Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I will be discussing our predictions for 2014. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 162.
[00:09] Music
[00:17] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:27] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:28] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Mike?
[00:34] Mike: Well, I got some exciting news. I sent out an email this morning to my launch list and invited a bunch of people to come out and test the Linux functionality.
[00:43] Rob: Of Audit Shark. Very cool. So Audit Shark is now live right? If people go to auditshark.com they’re able to sign up for a free trial, download the installer and get their server audited.
[00:54] Mike: Yup.
[00:55] Rob: Congratulations.
[00:56] Mike: Thanks. So yeah, all that stuff’s up and running but like I said, in last week’s episode. I mean I’m still going to my launch list and I plan on individually emailing people and trying to get them on boarded and making sure that anyone who’s on the launch list will get some extra special attention just because they were there first and I feel like they deserve a little bit of extra hand holding. I’ll also just established in that relationship I’ll make sure that I’m getting the feedback that I need from people to help flush out anything else that people need. So it’s not like I’m just throwing this out there and saying okay, Audit Shark has launched and hands off and doing nothing but marketing at this point. I almost feel like it’s still sort of a beta launch.
[01:34] Rob: I saw you use the word concierge in the email. I hope people get you’re like up to one hour, my concierge service – so that’s cool. That’s a nice offer. Good luck doing that in December when B-B slows down so much in December so obviously if there’s not a big response to this email, picking stuff back up in January is not a bad way to go.
[01:52] Mike: Yeah. In the past week I’ve had two different companies tell me hey I’d love to look at this but right now is a bad time. Get back to me in the first quarter or January whatever.
[02:00] Rob: So the first month of Drip, of the public launch just ended. So I sent out the big launch email November 6th. We have a 21 day trial so that will close at the end of November and quite pleased with revenue growth. I probably won’t talk much about revenue after this but I did want to say that first month of revenue was $7,000.
[02:21] Mike: Very nice.
[02:22] Rob: So yeah, I’m quite pleased with that. I figured that with the launch list as big as it was, if I didn’t get over 5,000 I was going to be quite disappointed and so to hit just over 7,000 and that looks like it may even grow a little bit, flat line or grow in December which is saying a lot because that’s always a pretty stagnant month but I’m happy with that. Now the real work begins.
[02:43] Mike: That’s one of the down sides of like launching a product is that you’re fighting all this time to get to the actual launch and you almost feel like you should be able to take a break at that point and it’s just totally not even remotely close to accurate.
[02:55] Rob: Yup. Now it’s all the experimentation, getting all the marketing engine going. How about you? What else is going on?
[03:02] Mike: The other thing in terms of Audit Shark, several people had actually asked me to prioritize a lot of the things that Audit Shark is doing so that’s probably about ¾ the way down right now. Everything on the Windows side is done and then there’s a lot of stuff that is on the Linux side that is probably halfway done at this point. But I would expect the next week or two that stuff will be completed and then my policy developer is going to continue working on all that stuff.
[03:24] Some of the attendees at MicroConf Europe had kind of challenged me to do a little bit more of a fundraiser for a charity based on the talk that I gave. And if you’re interested in doing any sort of year end donations to charities, go to kazoochallenge.com and I’ll be running a fundraiser there to help small children who have gotten cancer and basically just need a little bit of extra help. And you’ll be able to sign up for a mailing list. I’ll be doing a write-up and analysis of all the marketing efforts afterwards probably in January, so just going to talk about what sorts of things worked and what things didn’t. The website again is kazoochallenge.com and you can go sign up there if you’re looking for any sort of year end donations or if you’re just looking to help out people with cancer.
[04:05] Rob: Right. And this ties into your kazoo story that you made during MicroConf Europe and about how different messages sold more because it was in person or didn’t sell. If someone’s wondering what the heck you’re talking about go back and listen to our MicroConf Europe wrap up episode.
[04:19] So I have a couple of things. One is regarding HitTail and I actually want to send a shout out of thank you to Brendan Dunn of planscope.io. He’s a HitTail user and he’s also actually been one of the big early supporters of Drip and a really good first customer there. He has made a suggestion on how to get some value back into HitTail or get more value back because obviously HitTail has lost some value to customers because of Google’s recent not provided move. And at one point I had considered tying into the only place that Google still provides cure and that’s inside the Google web master tools area. But I hadn’t done it because there was a lack of data in there.
[04:58] But recently they’ve actually beefed that up surprisingly enough as they’ve killed off all the other SEO tools and made SEO harder. They have added some data in there and I now have enough that I can run the HitTail algorithm on that data so I’ll be implementing some stuff here in the next couple weeks and I’m pretty excited at the thought of being one of the few keyword tools that can get value out of Google keywords frankly.
[05:19] The other thing is there’s a really interesting article. It’s called the Saas analytics lifestyle. It’s at dirtyanalytics.com we’ll link that up in the show notes but it’s basically an expansion of what you and I talked about when we answered Andrey Butov’s question about how to do the early stage Saas marketing before you have enough volume to split test. What should you be doing? This guy talks about the three stages and the first stages like before you can see trends, it’s kind of like the things that don’t scale stage. And then there’s the seeing trends stage and then there’s the optimizing stage. And he talks about which tools and approaches you can use in each of those. Again, we’ll link it up in the show notes but that’s at dirtyanalytics.com.
[06:00 ] And finally I just read a book that I wanted to recommend to the audience called Masters of Doom and it’s about the guys who started id software, the two Johns who built Doom and Quake and a bunch of other games. Fascinating book, awesome startup tale and then of course like with Twitter and Facebook and these other startups the egos get in the way eventually and after these guys bought a bunch of Ferraris, they wind up kicking each other out of the company. And the company doesn’t work because the two geniuses behind it aren’t together anymore and overall it’s just a really inspiring story. In terms of the early days of when they’re actually cranking 100 hour a weeks in a beach house somewhere, there’s like 4 or 5 – it’s a lake house and they’re building these games, it’s such a fun ride.
[06:41] Nothing in here will help you launch your business aside from motivation. There’s no tactical stuff. There’s nothing that you should follow in terms of marketing approaches or anything because these guys, they were just crazy 20 year olds who coded so much and discovered these amazing game engines. So they invented them. And unless you’re going to go do that, there’s not much overlap with the kind of stuff we do. Overall, one of the better audio books that I‘ve listened to probably in the past six months.
[07:05] Mike: I think I remember hearing or reading recently that John Carmack is officially no longer associated with id software.
[07:12] Rob: How interesting. Yeah because John Romero got kicked out and left years before. I didn’t know. Because the book was written in 2003 so you kind of lose the last 10 years.
[07:22] Mike: I think the story was just he kind of stepped away to do other things but yeah it’s interesting to see how somebody can kind of come so far and say okay I just want to do something completely different.
[07:30] Rob: Yeah, I can totally see it. I mean that guy basically worked from the sounds of it he worked 80 or 90 hour weeks for 15-20 years on just gaming and building gaming and all that stuff. I can totally imagine it. And he made millions of dollars if not tens of millions of dollars and like I said, they literally bought Ferraris. They were like 21 or 22 and they’d go down to a leadership and pay cash. One of them owned multiple Ferraris and would invest six figures into souping them up. So it is that crazy kind of 1980’s excess lifestyle tale, that part of it. But none the less, I have a lot of respect for Carmack in particular. He was the programmer behind it whereas Romero, he’s like the game and level designer but Carmack, it sounds to me like without him I don’t think any of it would’ve have happened.
[08:12] Music
[08:15] Well, every year in around December time we like to talk about our predictions for the next year. And this year I thought it’d also be fun to review the predictions we made for 2013. So about a year ago, you and I went through think I made five predictions and you made four and we’ll run through those pretty quickly and talk about whether or not we feel like those happened or didn’t. And then we’ll talk about what we see coming up over the next 12 months. So I’ll kick us off with my first prediction for 2013 and I said that 2013 would be the year of Pinterest.
[08:43] I’ve been making this kind of the long haul on Pinterest for a couple of years. If you listened back two years ago I think I made a similar call like Pinterest was just going to grow. I think 2012 was a great year for Pinterest. 2013 I feel like although it continued to grow and they raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital at an exorbitant evaluation, I didn’t feel like it was as mainstream. At least I didn’t hear about it from the non-techies that I know as much as I did the previous year. But I do think Pinterest is kind of finding its niche and with the recipes and food, restaurants and there’s design there’s this whole tattoo and clothing and there’s a lot of niches where it’s a big deal.
[09:24] I do think that Pinterest is a gold mine. I think they’re much more commerce based even though they don’t have a lot of like commerce stuff going on. They’re testing like paid advertisements and I think they have the potential to be much more valuable than Twitter. I would say that my predication did not come true that it wasn’t the year of Pinterest that I actually think it could carry over and sometime in 2014 we’re going to be hearing more about how much money Pinterest is making. Even though they may not be as large as Twitter in terms of reach, I think they could actually be much more profitable.
[09:53] Mike: Yeah. I don’t think that I heard about Pinterest from anybody.
[09:56] Rob: Crazy and yet they did raise 2 to 300 million based on a really high evaluation and they released their API within the last month. There’s a lot going on there but it is like you said. It’s not as mainstream as Twitter or Facebook.
[10:12] Mike: One of the other ones I came up with was Google was going to continue to host people for using marketing techniques. They’ve advocated that people use for years with various algorithm updates. And I feel like they’ve done this.
[10:24] Rob: Yeah.
[10:25] Mike: Rob do you feel that way?
[10:26] Rob: Yeah. They’ve done so much. We’ve talked about how they blocked the scraping of their results so you can’t get rank tracking anymore, the not provided that they’ve done additional updates. I think there was a humming beard update. Absolutely. That goes in line with one of my predictions. My prediction was more Google changes that will hammer the SEO’s and I don’t just mean algorithm updates and I think that plays in well with what happened.
[10:49] Mike: Another one of mine was I don’t foresee Apple releasing any brand new products this coming year at least not at the scale of the iPhone or iPad or anything like that.
[10:57] Rob: Right. I think that’s correct because they just released some incremental updates to iPad and their normal laptops and the desktop and then they did iPad mini but I would call that an incremental as well. I think when you were talking about new products, you were basically saying they’re going to release a watch or a television. Those are the kind of things we discussed.
[11:16] Mike: Yeah.
[11:17] Rob: A couple of mine had to do with WordPress. One of them was WordPress will become even more prominent than it already is and I feel like – it’s a fairly safe prediction but WordPress continues to climb in its and how much of the internet it powers and the numbers vary but I think its somewhere around a fifth of the internet like 19% of the internet runs on WordPress so I don’t see that trend subsiding anytime soon. The other prediction was that subscription WordPress plug-ins would start to come around, would gain a little bit of prominence. I don’t think I’ve really seen that and I’m surprised. I’m surprised someone hasn’t figured out how to make that work yet but perhaps it will be in 2014.
[11:57] Mike: Yeah. I haven’t really seen that either but you’ll never know. I feel like it will come around at some point but one of the problems I see with it is just I’ll say the culture around people who are buying WordPress plug-ins because they expect that they buy it once and that’s it. It almost feels like you have to have an additional service behind it that going to continually be updated and used for other things because if everything’s coming into your website it feels difficult to justify pain like a monthly subscription for something that you’ve installed and its running on your servers and the data isn’t really going anywhere. You really need that integration someplace else that’s doing something on the back end.
[12:34] Rob: Right. Yeah. You need an external service that you’re paying for. So my last prediction for last year was the startup bubble would become more evident. Inflated evaluations would continue to rise and there would be either bursting in 2013 or 2014 and then I said this would only mean good news for those of us who don’t need to be acquired in order to build a successful business. Now start evaluations have continued to rise and become inflated as I’ve kind of stepped newly on to the angel investing scene and have been looking at evaluations people are asking. It is absolutely insane to me to see these $5 million evaluations on a company that’s basically two people with an angel list profile.
[13:12] Now nothing has burst at this point. I don’t know if it will happen in 2014 or not but the acquisition of Instragram for a billion dollars and I don’t know, there were few other this year that were just outlandishly in my opinion overvalued based on the value they bring. I’d say this one came through the bursting whether or not that happens this year I guess it remains to be seen.
[13:36] Mike: My last prediction was that Windows 8 was not going to take the world by storm
[13:39] Rob: I would say that was correct. That was probably a pretty safe prediction at the time.
[13:44] Mike: The thing is I haven’t tried Windows 8 yet at the time I played around with it on the surface pro like best buy and things like that so it’s not terribly exciting. It’s new and it’s different but it doesn’t have – there’s like the refinemence that I think that it needs that it still just don’t have yet.
[14:00] Rob: Let’s dive into our 2014 predictions. We each have a handful here. My first is that Twitter will become profitable because they have an IPO so they have to release their info and they are not a profitable company. I think they will become profitable in 2014. I also think they will piss off their users in the process because it’s going to mean ads. One way or another it’s going to mean catering to advertisers. Now the good news is that I think there’s going to be a solid opportunity for paid placement and promotion. They’re already pushing their paid tweets, their sponsored tweets but what we have seen with early ad networks, like when ad words first came up, when Facebook ads first started and now looking at Twitter and I think Pinterest is another one where this could happen. There are opportunities for small entrepreneurs like us to get in and really learn the system before other people know it and there’s a lot of arbitrage opportunities to get in there at those early clicks.
[14:56] Remember the five cent ad word clicks that people talk about? I think there’s potential for Twitter and Pinterest to potentially have those this year. But those things eventually go away. Facebook ads have become more expensive overtime. They’re still workable but they were cheaper two years ago. They were more I’d say more effective based on price a couple of years ago so keep your eye out for that.
[15:18] Mike: My first prediction for 2014 is that Apple releasing any sort of a new product is sort of a give me.
[15:25] Rob: Indeed. So you’re saying like a watch or a TV or something.
[15:28] Mike: Yes. Something along those lines. I mean just something that is completely different than the things that they’ve put out in the past. It’s going to be something that is not an incremental update.
[15:37] Rob: Got it. Yeah and that ties into my second prediction which is that Apple will release an I-watch or some type of wearable watch device. There’s so many rumors about that being in development that I think you’re right. I think they’ve taken a year off from releasing new products and that they kind of got to get back in the game or else stock market’s going to start punishing them.
[15:57] My next prediction is for Saas business that concierge services will become a requirement if you’re in a crowded market. We’ve talked a lot about this software plus a service plus a concierge service and on-boarding service and a hand holding service. And I think that’s going to continue to become – maybe it won’t be the norm in 2014 but the exceptional companies are going to do that in 2014 and I think it will become the norm past that because the market is just they’re getting too crowed. There’s a lot of Saas apps. The secret’s out that Saas is subscription revenue and that it’s a really good way to go if you want to launch a software company. And so in order to set yourself apart, you have to do things that other people won’t and a lot of developers who can write code don’t want to do any type of – basically the schlepping.
[16:45] Remember Paul Gram talked about this? He talked about the problems that are hard that you have to schlep through. And a lot of developers are going to avoid this and so that makes it more lowing fruit for people who are willing to do stuff that doesn’t scale in order to get their business off the ground and concierge is one of those efforts.
[17:03] Mike: So this one for me is a two part one. The first part is that investors are going to pour a lot more money into startups. I feel that way because there’s one of two things that’s happening is the evaluations are going up so investors are just naturally going to start pouring more money into it until it’s just no longer financially viable for them to do so or that bubble just burst. So either way they’re still going to be dumping money into them but I think another reason why they’re going to start doing that is because a lot of the safe haven investments are starting to go away because the economies of the world seem to be coming out of the recessions of the past couple of years.
[17:38] So when that happens, investors naturally start seeing okay well I’m going to start taking more risks because these other safe investments, they’re no longer paying off for me so I’m going to start taking those risks because they will start paying off. And then the second side of that is that I think you’re going to see a lot more of the high profile acquisition attempts start to be turned down. And one that struck me as bizarre was Snapchat turning down or allegedly turning down the $3 billion offer from Facebook.
[18:07] Rob: What were you thinking?
[18:08] Mike: Yes, I know exactly. What were you guys thinking? I have no idea. Sure, it’s yours. I would’ve taken 2 ½ but hey, who’s going to split hairs over that?
[18:17] Rob: Man, my prediction for 2014 is that Snapchat, we won’t even be talking about it by the end of it. I just can’t imagine actually being a viable social network in 12 months and I think that this may go down as one of those major business mistakes not taking the $3 billion check from Facebook.
[18:33] Mike: But I can also see a lot of other people saying well Snapchat turned it down and there must be a lot of smart people working over there so it must make sense at least at some level to turn down outlandish purchase offers especially when Facebook is offering $3 billion because if that’s the case, then Facebook obviously saw something they wanted and they wanted bad. So I can see other companies putting themselves in that position and holding themselves up to that standard and saying well, we have a better product than Snapchat or we’re worth that much too. So I can definitely see people turning down those high offers whether it’s a mistake or not will kind of remain to be seen but I really do think that Snapchat made a big mistake.
[19:17] Rob: My next prediction is about kick starter and I’m a major feened. I’ve probably backed 20 different kick starter projects and in fact over thanksgiving I think I backed like 5 or 6 just surfing around my iPad during that weekend. But I predict that this year kick starters can have a product that is a major multimillion dollar failure and what I mean by that is a project that raises a bunch of money and then doesn’t deliver. They’ve toyed with this in the past. This has happened on smaller levels kick starter has increased kind of their verbiage and their risk verbiage and you have to say there’s a lot of risks in this project and blah, blah.
[19:56] But these kick starter projects are getting bigger and bigger and they’re raising more and more money and it’s just bound to happen based on odds that tens of millions that were raised in 2013 that are basically pledged to be delivered in 2014, my prediction is that something’s going to happen with one of those and then it’s going to be all over the news when that happens. I don’t think it would ruin kick starter and I don’t think it’s the end of the world but I do think that we’ll be hearing about it at some point in the next 12 months.
[20:23] Mike: Wasn’t there a project to fund the company to develop a basically competitor to Facebook? I think there was a group of 5 or 6 people who they were college kids I think out of New York city that raised something like $100,000 and I could see that totally going south because the level of engineering effort that people would underestimate needs to be done to support an infrastructure like Facebook has, I would imagine those type of people just don’t have the understanding of the infrastructure needed.
[20:55] Rob: I don’t even think it’s a technology problem. It’s the momentum problem. It’s the market place problem because what’s the Facebook clone when you have 50 users? For them to get to critical mass would be insanely hard. Even if they can code what’s needed to duplicate Facebook and I don’t particularly doubt that they can, it’s going to be the getting critical mass that’s going to be a problem and we’re seeing that with app.net right now. They’re doing okay but they are struggling to build quickly. And if you get in there, you don’t – there aren’t very many people that you know in there because well, it’s just not big enough.
[21:30] Mike: Unless there’s some sort of integration with Facebook and Facebook has kind of locked everybody out at this point so I don’t see they’re going to be able to suck those users out of Facebook and nobody really wants to float back and forth between multiple social networks I don’t think. Another prediction that I have is that I don’t think we’re going to see a clear winner in either the game console market or in tablets. I think it’s going to go back and forth a little bit especially in the console market juts because of the difference in some of the games that they have because there’s platform specific games for the Xbox 1 or the Play Station 4 and I think depending on what games come out is going to dictate a little bit of that back and forth but those really aren’t going to hit their strive for probably 4 or 5 years just the same way that their previous consoles did.
[22:12] Rob: I can’t comment on the game consoles. I don’t follow that closely enough. I think with tablets, depends on how you define a clear winner because android is out selling IOS now by 2 or 3 to 1. And so if you mean a clear winner in terms of android units moved in 2014 versus IOS, I think android’s going to win. Now on the flip side, Apple has way higher profit margins than any of the android companies, the companies putting out android tablets. So if you go based on the actual amount of net profit produced, then I think Apple will probably continue to be the winner in 2014. Now as we slide into 2015 I think that the margins could be squeezed. I don’t think iPad’s going to suddenly go away in 2014.
[22:54] Mike: I don’t see either android or IOS pushing the other one out and I understand that they’re fighting pretty hard for market share against each other but I just don’t see either one of them dominating the other and I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon because there are some people who prefer a much more open market place where they can install anything they want and then there others who would much rather have Apple take control over the ecosystem and say these are things that are allowed and these are things that are not. And just because you’ve got what seems to be a critical mass of each faction, I don’t see either one of them going away.
[23:28] Rob: We have a lot of Apple predictions here because my next prediction is that Apple will continue to lose market share in the IOS market specifically both with phones and tablets as history starts to repeat itself. And what I mean by that is Apple and Microsoft competed with Windows and the Mac OS back in the 80’s and the open version one in terms of market share. And we are seeing a similar trend right now and we’re seeing android take it over. I think android is over between 70% and 80% of the – it’s the mobile OS market, if it’s combined phone and tablet or if that’s just phone. But they are just swarming the market.
[24:07] Now again, the net profit is still with Apple right now for the time being but the net profit was also still with Apple in 1982 and ’83 as they were battling back and forth against the DOS stuff and IBM’s PC. If you look at the trending lines, it’s an interesting trend. Now I say this as someone who essentially owns in this house right now there are eight Apple computers including laptops, iPads and mobile phones and so I am an Apple supporter and someone who like being in that ecosystem. But it’s going to be interesting times over the next couple years to see how this plays out and to see if in fact history does repeat itself with android and IOS like it did with Mac OS and windows.
[24:50] Mike: Why don’t I switch over to Google in a little bit and say I think that the Google glass is going to become publicly available in either really, really late 2014 or early 2015.
[24:59] Rob: How about more of a prediction not like when it’s released but do you think that it’s going to become a mainstream thing? Do you think that a lot of people that is going to sell well or that it’s going to be a flop?
[25:08] Mike: I think that there are going to be certain applications for it that it’s going to do extremely well and I think that they’re going to be in places where you wouldn’t necessarily think that they would be or that they should be and I’ll give you an example. In warehouses, I can see them being very, very huge and the reason for that is back 12 or 14 years ago, I worked on a project for a warehouse where it was basically they were switching over from a paper base system to voice recognition system.
[25:36] So I implemented all these API’s and everything to talk back and forth between databases and a voice recognition unit where instead of somebody using all these papers to walk around the warehouse and get all the stuff they then just would talk into this unit and the unit would tell them where they needed to go and how much of the stuff that they needed to get. And I can see them taking something like that and switching it over to something like Google glass where Google glass shows them the information as opposed to the talking into a headset and having it being voice recognition only.
[26:06] So I think that applications like that where you need to display a lot of data and you really do need to have your hands free in order to do other things construction jobs, I’ll say a lot more of the blue collar type jobs that are out there for that type of experience where they do need that data, anything where they can get rid of the paper, they’re going to start doing that.
[26:27] Rob: So then the answer to my question of do you think they’ll be successful is no because if Google is only able to get Google glass into niche professional applications. It is not going to sell 100 million units which is the kind of success that the iPad and the iPhone and recent innovations have. That’s like the big mark of holy crap, this is an amazing hardware success. If Google sells a couple million glass units, I would guess that it would be dubbed a failure. And I think if it’s a niche thing like you’re saying where you had doctor’s offices or with people in warehouses that those would be the kind of numbers that hits.
[27:06] Mike: That’s a niche that I could see it definitely going in but I mean you think about all the different applications for something like that, you could say oh well, used in doctor’s offices so that the doctor doesn’t have to go back to his computer or go over some place to log in. That would be one application of it or traders on Wall Street. That would be another application. So there’s all these I’ll say really tight niches that it could be used in but I think that there’s a lot of them and I think that Google’s going to depend and rely heavily on their developers to develop products for those different industries to help them sell Google glass.
[27:39] And then obviously Google is going to want to be able to display advertisements and stuff like that later on the future but I could definitely see it becoming a big thing but I don’t think it’s going to become the big thing overnight. It’s going to have to wait until the ecosystem is there for the applications for those different niches.
[27:57] Rob: This is actually a good time that I was going to mention something about catching a wave as its going up and that’s one thing that id software did in that book Masters of Doom I mentioned is they caught the video game wave and they wrote it and they did really well with it but they worked hard and they basically cut a growth market. And in the 80’s that was PC’s and it was PC gaming. In the 90’s that was the internet. In 2000 it was mobile. So talk is that in the 2010’s to 2020’s is going to be wearable’s and also I think drones like flyables and stuff, attaching cameras and different delivery stuff to drone.
[28:32] So if you are looking to get way out there, you’re probably going to need funding to do this or you’re going to need to basically work your butt off to learn the infrastructure ahead of people. Google glass is a place I would look. I would look also at these wearable watches and stuff. These are super risky right? Because you could spend a bunch of – spend a whole year investing time, money, effort into being at the forefront of these things and anyone of them could tank. There’s no guarantee they’re going to work.
[28:57] But those are the places where the biggest Greenfield and is essentially that if you’re out ahead of other folks just like the people who are out ahead of IOS and got their apps on early are the ones that eventually had the amazingly successful games and actually mage quite a bit of money from mobile apps. So my last prediction for 2014 is that integration marketing will pick up steam as more companies offer API’s and become more interconnected.
[29:21] Integration marketing’s something I’ve talked about several times where you essentially integrate your software with other software in order to do two things. 1) to provide value to your users of course but then also so that company will promote you to their audience and that allows you to bring in some of their users to come use your app. I see more and more people doing this successfully and they’re just more API’s. It’s expected now that everybody’s releasing API’s and the need to have integrated data between all these dispersed apps is as high as it’s ever been. And so I think that integrations themselves are growing but I also think there’s opportunity here for entrepreneurs to use these integrations as integration marketing.
[30:03] Mike: So where’s the Drip API?
[30:05] Rob: I have a Drip API. We have a JavaScript one and a rest API. If you got getdrip.com and look at the doc’s link in the footer.
[30:13] Mike: Well I stand corrected then.
[30:15] Rob: Very good.
[30:17] Mike: My last couple predictions are the first one is more of our listeners are going to start to fly solo. I think that as the economy recovers and people become a little bit more stable in their jobs are going to start to look elsewhere because they’re going to become a little bit more risk tolerant just because the job market is improving and they’re going to see a lot of opportunities. Whereas before, it would’ve been a much bigger risk to quit your job and go do something and I think that just based on the general trend that I’ve seen, I think a lot more people are just starting business in general. So I can see a lot of our listeners kind of going that road and doing their own thing.
[30:52] And then the last one that I have I think target marketing at individuals is going to start to become more of a reality. And by targeted at individuals, did you ever see the movie – I think it was Minority Report?
[31:05] Rob: Total Recall is the one I remember but it may have been Minority Report as well where they could look at your eyes and it would speak to you by name.
[31:12] Mike: Yeah. It was Minority Report and I could definitely see that type of tracking mechanism start to become a bigger thing and I’ve seen it a little bit right now. So for example if you have an iPhone and you have the Dunkin Donuts app installed, it can pop up and give you special offers when you’re close to their store. And there’s a bunch of other apps that are doing very similar things but I can see either Apple or Google starting to take some of those things and making them generally available within the platform itself and allowing other applications to hook into those and start just popping those off so that when you’re close to them, there are going to give you that targeted marketing.
[31:53] Rob: Right. So that’s more location based marketing than individual marketing.
[31:57] Mike: It is. But if you have – for example I have the Dunkin Donuts apps so they have an idea of 1) they could figure out where I live just based on where I’m going and then 2) if I’m taking the same route every day, they could basically pinpoint what my route is going to be and then say hey, you’re going to go pass this Dunkin Donuts anyway. Let me pop this up 20 minutes or 30 minutes in advance of when we think that you’re going to go buy there because you go buy here at 8 o’clock in the morning every day. So half an hour in advance I’m going to pop something up that gives you a special offer so that you think about it before you even get on the road.
[32:33] Mike: Right. I would say that’s – I don’t even know that’s a prediction because I think that’s already happening. You’re talking about behavioral based marketing that it looks at your behavior, it looks at your location overtime and basically pitches you things. I think that’s a big part of Four Square. Isn’t it? Isn’t that part of their revenue model? is that if you check into a bunch of places it knows that you’re like a customer of those things and then it makes you offers based on that behavior and location?
[32:59] Mike: It could very well be which makes me correct.
[33:02] Rob: You’re correct already. This is awesome. Congratulations Mike.
[33:05] Mike: Thank you.
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Congratulations Mike!!