Category: Spuul

Wishing for more powerful app store payments

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Was sent this article by my bro @groovemonkey (with a lot more followers than me) and it got me thinking more about app stores and payments.

This is the read: http://dancounsell.com/articles/paid-paymium-or-freemium.

Paymium is still relatively unknown and gets pretty much no press coverage compared to freemium. Paymium is going to become increasingly more widespread over the coming year, and incase you’re wondering exactly what paymium is, here’s my definition:

Paymium: An app that is paid for up-front, with additional revenue being generated by charging for extra features via In-App Purchase.

As with freemium this type of model can work perfectly well in place of yearly paid upgrades as you can add new features overtime with IAP to continue to earn revenue from your existing customers.

Paymium apps currently only account for 2% of apps on the App Store, yet they generate the same amount of revenue as paid apps. I believe now is a good time for developers to start experimenting more with this revenue model, I know It’s something we’ll be doing with a few of our apps at Realmac Software over the coming months.

This is a very interesting model and was wondering how to apply it to Spuul but I don’t see a fit, however part of that reason is I think both app stores, Google and Apple (is there any other?), don’t offer a lot of flexibility when it comes to payments and customers. What I mean is everything is so rigid when it comes to subscription based payments.

For example with Apple they don’t offer any sort of trial capability. Example. Please buy this monthly subscription and you can use it for free for 7 days and if you like it just keep using it and we bill you after the trial period. If you can cancel during the trail period you don’t get charged but you get your 7 days. Google, Facebook and Amazon (they don’t let you set the time period though) all offer it with good results. People tend to try it and the conversion rates are good.

The other problem with almost all of these systems is that they offer fairly rigid subscription SKUs that do not transfer or modify across lines. For example – I have a 1.99 payment tier for a monthly subscription and I also have a 4.99. Customer A buys the 1.99 tier and a month later wants the 4.99. The app stores should provide an automatic upgrade SKU and just start billing the user at 4.99. Even be smart enough to charge the difference if customer A upgrades within the month. There is little intelligence in the subscription SKUs so usually one has to cancel one to get another versus upgrading or downgrading.

So when I think of the paymium stuff I think of interesting use cases like you buy the app for 1.99 and later if you upgrade in app to another tier the 1.99 could be credited by the system since the customers used the same app store for the whole process. There are other examples along this line I can think of.

What I am looking for is the app stores to provide all the bells and whistles to allow us, the developer, to craft any sort of payment and decision flow we want knowing the user is able to pay with the app store and we are able to offer what we want real time based on what the data is telling us might sell. Standard consumer sales type of stuff.

Bottom line is the app stores are generally taking 30% and I think the should offer more value for it. Don’t get me wrong – app stores are doing good things and the payment mechanisms make it easy to build mobile apps and extract money for services but their overall intelligence and feature level is still pretty rudimentary.

Freemium

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am trying to blog more this year but I also said that last year as well. What can I say – I try.

I read this on SplatF and mostly agree about not wanting to waste time on social but write more – even if in smaller chunks.

I love twitter though cause it kicks of nice conversations that spurn me to write something. Yesterday was no exception.

Thanks to Chris and Dave for the inspiration.

Here is the string of tweets :: https://twitter.com/myeggnoodles/status/420423888342749186

I think Chris is making a great point and one I have always subscribed to when I considered joining or building a startup. The business goals of such startup should be to generate revenue. Within this framework though I think freemium is an accepted model. Because some startups, Spuul for example, are building in an area where piracy is rampant and the user population in places like India or Pakistan is not accustomed to having to pay. Or maybe they want to or would pay but the payment methods are not there.

I think other business models also run into the same hurdles so offering a free to use product that strives to convert the free user into some sort of paid user is an acceptable model. In our case we are also putting an ad business around the free model so it will also generate revenue.

All that being said. This is hard stuff. A lot of what we launched with has changed. We offer more subscription tiers than originally expected. We had to learn how to upsell. Had to decide over time on which features to make free and which features to make available only to paid users. We had to learn how to not try and attract only free users but users who wanted to kick the tires for purposes of deciding for themselves if they would eventually upgrade. Meaning there is a big difference in marketing to get a free user and marketing to get a user who starts as free but has the propensity to pay.

Lots of work to sort all these flows out and to build a business around freemium but I think in emerging markets and for some business verticals – freemium can work.

The other school of thought says only build something people want to pay for. This for some business verticals might also be doable but it may not always work. Either way I think it takes time to do either of these well and at scale. Generally startups are rushed to sort this out and don’t have the time to experiment to see what sticks.

After all an early stage startup really is just an experiment.

happy building!

Wow. Where did 2013 go?

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Between the year of the baby and the startup – 2013 just blew by. I had wanted to blog a lot more than I did but as usual between work and diapers – I tend to run out of time. Probably won’t get any better this year but that’s okay – I have resolved myself to focusing on a few things so I do them well. Such is life.

I had an awesome holiday with the family this year to Japan. It was an ambitious trip, maybe overly so, in that we did 4 days in Tokyo then got in a car and drove in a very circuitous way to Kyoto. It was a bit much on some days given the 5 year old and the 1 year old can get car weary but we saw so many things and the countryside was gorgeous. The Thais saw their first snow and I enjoyed the great roads and awesome scenery. My friends over at http://japanbikerentals.com hooked me up. Look them up if you ever want to ride a motorcycle on tour in Japan. Great bunch of folks.

When I returned from Japan I was thrust back into the chaos of Spuul – what I mean is startups are chaotic and it is to be expected somewhat. I even penned an email to the founders about feeling too chaotic and wanting to reign it in somehow. Maybe it was just my state of mind after the trip and not thinking about work too much. Not even sure it was the right thing to but fortunately my relationship with the founders is very open and candid – I always feel like I can speak my mind.

Then today I read this. Lots of cold water thrown on my let’s slow it down theory:

http://steveblank.com/2009/04/10/good-enough-decision-making/

Love this excerpt:

Decision Making Heuristics for the Startup CEO

The heuristic I gave my friend was to think of decisions of having two states: those that are reversible and those that are irreversible. An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc. If the decision was a bad call you can unwind it in a reasonable period of time. An irreversible decision is firing an employee, launching your product, a five-year lease for an expensive new building, etc. These are usually difficult or impossible to reverse.

I realize now that this is what the founders practice anyway and what I have been doing a lot of. If it is just code and no one is harmed – just do it. We can also roll it back or alter it or even stay the course. No harm no foul. This is such a great reason to even be in a startup because you can move fast and change tactics at anytime. You still need the vision, the gut intuition and the confidence to move but you can always be moving versus thinking about moving.

I am trying to sort out how best to apply this to the way I run product at Spuul which is well – slightly different I think than most places. We just move – versus talk or meet a lot about moving. So far it is working but we have a long ways to go.

2014 is upon us. Make it count!

The impossible user contract!

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am sure this subject is like opening a can of flaming hot worms – there really is no one answer to it.

I stumbled across this today:
http://steveblank.com/2013/11/21/when-product-features-disappear-amazon-apple-and-tesla-and-troubled-future-of-21st-century-consumers/

The downside is when companies unilaterally remove features from their products without asking their customers permission and/or remove consumers’ ability to use the previous versions. Products can just as easily be downgraded as upgraded.

Steve makes some fair points but as a PM myself I grapple with this concept all the time. Do we have some contract with the users that we must keep everything we have ever put in the product alive? Steve almost alludes to that but I know he is just trying to make the point – especially as compared to what has happened lately with products like the Apple iWork suite.

Huge backlash over the new completely rewritten stack losing some key features but with Apple slowly pouring them back in on a new code base. The premise is that Apple rewrote the iWork suite to make it function across iOS, web and OSX. Now that the rewrite happened they are adding some, but not all, of the features back in. Seems logical but as a user you might still hate it since you still lose the feature and running old version is hard to do these days.

Latest on the iWork shuffle:
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/21/iwork-for-for-ios-and-mac-updated-keynote-gains-with-new-transitions/

We experienced some of this at Spuul as we moved over to our new API stack, brought to you by the code magicians at Spuul, since we pretty much rewrote everything from the ground up to accommodate more clients and features. This also meant looking at our current feature usage and deciding what features might stay and which ones might hit the bit bucket. Did I ask users about this? No. Mostly cause the data largely answered the questions for us – we could see what was being used and what wasn’t. We could also look at our help queries and the customers emails that I save. All of these made up a nice view that for the most part gave us a clear indication of what to do. Then we added in some ideas of our own and logical guesses to decide what to throw out and what to save.

Some of the goals were the same as Apple really. Build from a new more agile base, simplify, and then work our way back up. We are just not as big so the impact isn’t the same. With Apple – they are so big that practically anything they do will affect someone in some way. I don’t know if Apple handled it right- most of the cuts haven’t affected me but I assume they affected someone. Could Apple have polled everyone? Maybe but the poll would have created a funnel for people to complain and then even more press about it. I am not sure anyone wins at this. Expectations are just so high that everyone expects to be pleased in their own way setting up an impossible user contract.

Steve Blank uses other examples like Tesla and Google to prove his point. The Tesla one is the most interesting cause it is a software update that changes the car – something very tangible. I think Tesla should have been upfront about it and stated that for the safety of the occupants in their vehicles they felt this is the best way to handle it until they come up with more data or options. Just doing it without telling folks seems sly – in a bad way even if the goal is for good.

Steve closes out with user contract idea of some sorts:

A 21st Century Bill of Consumer Product Rights

For books/texts/video/music:

  • No changes to content paid for (whether on a user’s device or accessed in the cloud)


    • For software/hardware:

  • Notify users if an update downgrades or removes a feature
  • Give users the option of not installing an update
  • Provide users an ability to rollback (go back to a previous release) of the software

    • This is interesting but in the world of App Stores this is tough to manage with all the auto-updating and no ability to roll back. So for any of this to happen the folks like Apple, Google and MSFT would have to allow the developers to manage stuff like this. Today it is not really clear how one would do that.

    Great topic to think about but a tough one to really have a definitive answer for.

    iOS or Android first?

    ~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

    Update: Bernard did a nice piece, much longer than mine, about this as well. Check it out:

    http://www.bernardleong.com/2013/11/19/android-or-ios-first-definitive-guide-startups-corporations/

    ————-

    I am a slacker when it comes to blogging cause I just don’t put enough focus on it. Love writing and I have so much I want to say but I don’t have enough time to always put together a quality post. For a while now I have been meaning to discuss the whole Android iOS debate a bit further. This was mostly due to this article :: http://stevecheney.com/why-android-first-is-a-myth/

    With Spuul we went iOS first – for good reason. We were going after the Indians who live overseas and since we are in the streaming video space there is still not a great secure standard for doing proper streaming video on Android. Apple has eHLS built in so it was a no brainer. In general I think it really depends on the markets you are going after and what your product is that will decide which platform to tackle first. The idea that there is a blanket rule for one or the other seems to be for developed markets but if say for example you are going after India, Pakistan or the Middle East – it would be hard to think that going after iOS first would make much sense. Android is just much bigger in the undeveloped markets. That’s a fact and Apple for the time being is not concerned with this.

    I love iOS. I won’t lie. As a USER it is the best thing ever. As a coder, which I am not, coders tell they like iOS better but of course my Android guys loves coding Java. He loves making our Android app but guess what he carries as his primary phone? An iPhone cause as a USER it provides him what he wants in his day to day experience. So from different angles one platform may appear to be better than the other.

    As the product guy I must admit that as of late – I would rather manage an Android app than an iOS one. This is another field I want to talk about but for another post – the whole product manager thing. Lately Google is making big strides in the Android world when it comes to what they offer the folks managing an app to success both in usage and monetization.

    Yes – at the core Apple users tend to buy more and tend to pay for things that people on Android tend to think should be free. Our stats show this over and over again but the growth in Android is eye popping and shows no signs of abating. Plus, as noticed on my recent trip to India, you see way more Android than iOS. Still even with this stats – we get more people paying in India on iOS than on Android. I am sure this is a global phenomenon.

    All that being said I think most companies going for the jugular will need to support iOS, Android and Windows Phone. It might be easy to say go iOS first but once again it depends on the market, the product and the monetization strategies. If you are not going where iOS is the core leader than chances are hitting Android first might make more sense.

    The issue for me lately is around app management and monetization. This is what is causing me to favor Android recently. What I mean by favor Android is that sometimes it is making more sense to lead or test features with Android first and then if they make sense bring the same features over to iOS. Why? Simple. I don’t have to wait for approvals when pushing a new app, Google has a built in beta program for apps, and I can pretty much sell anything I want via in app purchase. On top of that Google is hooking up with carriers around the globe to offer carrier billing for in app purchase. This is huge stuff and slowly it is turning the tide some in the ecosystem wars.

    Further to this is the ability for us to see our comments and ratings on our Android app while also being able to reply to the commenters. At Spuul we experienced first hand how a lot of comment/rating is mostly drivel and even some weird form of trolling but yet once you start responding to everyone the trolling stops and the reviewers tend to take a more logical approach. Bottom line is we managed our app up from 3.x to 4.x by responding to the users and using this channel as a form of communication and support. This is something Apple is sorely missing out on in my opinion. This is where you can see Google knowing how to build for the internet extending a slight light due to their technical prowess.

    On monetization Apple leads but increasingly Google is offering more ways to get it done – the carrier billing movement for example is very real and brings paying for things to the masses without credit cards. Yes Apple has a lot of users with cards but this is concentrated in the developed markets thus making it useless in the undeveloped markets where people want to pay with phone credits or post paid billing cycles. The second area of differentiation is where Google, although they sell movies and music, allows a developer to use in app purchase for anything – meaning I can use their stack to also sell my own movies and music. Apple on the other hand prevents developers from using in app purchase where the developer is selling something similar to iTunes. For example – Spuul cannot sell an individual movie via our iOS app. Only Apple can. It’s silly but yet is a sign of the difference. Apple makes money on the transaction anyway so not clear why they don’t allow us to use it apart from the only reason I can think of which is to protect iTunes. If Apple wants to win in the living room with something like Apple TV then they need to let developers charges for things – single movie or subscriptions.

    For the moment I only see Android and iOS winning. Will this last – tough to say but slowly I think Google is chipping away,ever so slightly, at Apple’s lead by making this fit the way the world is moving. Apple could easily reverse this by also providing some of the same capabilities in their platform.

    Time will tell.

    Isn’t every startup like a platform?

    ~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

    Great article, looks to be a series I think, about platforms. This is from Ryan – ex twitter exec.

    http://sarver.org/2013/09/26/what-is-a-platform/

    I guess my angle here is I tend to think of any startup as a platform. It may not be that it fits the exact description for how the tech industry defines a platform but I like to think of the problems I work on as a platform play. It helps me in taking the long view since I think unless you are incredible lucky, like 3 year old instagram, most startups will be at it a while.

    As I like to tell people – it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

    Most platforms take the view of apps or software stacks that are available for developers to build on and the effect of this creates a network effect to further drive the platform. So iOS, facebook, twitter, microsoft, android and others are listed by Ryan as examples of platforms under the common agreement for how platforms are defined. All good – I won’t argue with that premise.

    But when it comes to building your startup, no matter what it is – I think this platform methodology can help you define things to work on and focus on. I like this line:

    This created a very powerful network effect that drove growth of both sides of the business (developers and users) where growth of one side directly benefited the other.

    I think about how the growth on one side directly benefits some other side of your startup. So if you think of all the sides or facets of your startup – you can think about how work on one side can directly benefit another side – find ways to see if the network effect is at all applicable to your startup.

    So when I think of spuul – I think of it as a platform for India video consumption and all the sides of the business are broken down in ways to allow me to see the overall product as a platform and to then focus my efforts on figuring how the sides of the platform can feed off each other.

    Product management means many things to many different people – I will talk about my theory on it all later – it more closely resembles chaos theory than anything super organized. I realize that breaks a lot of know product management constructs right out of the gate but the craft, yes it is a craft, of making a digital product is an evolving field with many different ways to skin the cat. If I look at all the ways to skin a problem – looking at my product as a platform helps me to focus my efforts.

    Looking forward to more from Ryan on this subject and seeing where I can apply it at work.

    Also going to read this :: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262050852_Download_the_full_text.pdf

    back to work…

    Learning to scale

    ~ michael_msft ~ 4 Comments

    No – not talking about code here since I am far from an expert in scaling systems – that’s why I hire people smarter than me.

    Talking about myself actually. I like to think I am fairly organized but I will admit that generally I feel as through I am hurtling through space and time grabbing things as I go and completing them but always feeling like I am on to the next thing quicker than I want to be. So if you can picture that then you will realize that the only logical choice I have is to focus on less things since time is not going to expand and excelling at my craft requires focus. I do believe strongly that running a product team is a craft and I can only get better at with experience and focus.

    That being said I think it is important to try and give back where I can. I used to think this meant going to events or trying to stay plugged into the community but the effort to stay plugged in is time consuming and I am not sure there is much gained from it except for specific situations where I have met someone that I later became friends with or worked with. So this is important but I think one can see events as the be all end all when they are not. So choose your events wisely and attend them with the goal of getting the most out of them.

    Apart from spuul, my current location for perfecting my craft, I obviously still want to stay in the community but this year I decided I would channel that focus a bit. I am finding that being involved in the jfdi mentor program has been just the ticket. I don’t know how best to do it other than jump in and make myself available. I am not always in town but when I am in town I plan on spending a morning at jfdi and get as many meetings as I can in the calendar with any of the startups that want to meet. Yesterday there were six busy, but largely productive meetings.

    I like the one to many method in which I can spend my time but truth be told I am learning as much as I am giving. I think anytime one has to channel their energies into helping others one will get as much from it as they give. This model is allowing me to scale my time in the community better and hopefully keep myself plugged in.

    If you are unaware of the latest batch of startups you can check them out here: http://jfdi.asia/portfolio/

    I won’t discuss them here but check them out – some of them have even launched their services to the public so try it and support the products. I will admit I am partial to a few – especially the ones that give me shirts. #mentorspoils

    October is a special month. Lots going on in the region, spuul will be launching some kick ass stuff and I am taking a holiday to Japan!

    Carry on…

    Google will have to deal with android

    ~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Saw this today on the wire and had to think about it some.

    We know RIM is dead. Over. They can open up BBM and hire lots of celebs to flog it. It’s over. It is NOT coming back. Someone may buy it but I don’t think RIM is even worth buying at this point.

    MSFT just bought Nokia and we will have the integrated software and hardware stack that is Windows Phone.

    I have written about dealing with android before from the perspective of Spuul – http://www.nokpis.com/2013/08/13/android-is-a-bigger-ecosystem-but-takes-more-work/ .

    When I look at the android device charts for our Spuul app it is totally dominated by Samsung – but we also see MicroMax in the top 10 as well for India. Somehow I just think this won’t last since the world is getting that the vertically integrated stack that starts with the hardware/software combo is the way forward.

    MSFT now gets this.
    Apple invented it.

    Samsung gets it but they don’t have the apps or the software – they use Google for that. What would a Samsung phone be without android and Play Store – it would look like the old shitty pre android Samsung phones. No one buys those anymore.

    Google has to do something. Is it going to abandon android for a Chrome ecosystem? I guess it is possible but they don’t seem to be moving very fast on that. Chromebook sucks and I can easily live without my Chrome browser – I know others can’t. When I look at the development work for android for what we do – there is NO path to Chrome for dealing with secure audio video well with the UX performance we desire. If this is the path why are they not showing it yet?

    Samsung to me either had to fork their own stuff or come up with something new – otherwise they are just too dependent on Google. Google is too big and powerful at this point with the full stack that they will let one vendor be the face of their ecosystem. I know they have Motorola now and maybe it eventually is just going to be Google Phone but even that is moving pretty slow.

    I can’t predict the future but I just don’t see Google not wanting to change the consumer perception that the Mobile World is Apple, Microsoft and Samsung in the eyes of people buying phones.

    Crazy week in my World!

    ~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

    First up we have Rakuten buying Viki. http://blog.viki.com/2013/09/letter-from-vikis-ceo.html . This was probably be the biggest tech news for me personally. One I almost went to work there so I follow Viki very closely. I guess you can also say I am in the same space as them but much farther behind in our maturity but what happened to Viki is great for a startup like Spuul in Singapore. It shows the video space is hot, you can build something global from Singapore, exits can happen and that the dream is alive.

    I am very curious to see what happens next to the company, who stays around and what Rakuten does with all these disparate pieces that are supposedly tied back into e-commerce. People say it is like Amazon or Netflix – not sure I see that yet. I can imagine the Amazon comparison but where is the cloud stuff? Either way Rakuten is a force and now Viki has some serious backing and is supposedly somewhat independent. All debating aside – congratulations to the Viki team for an amazing exit.

    Next we have MSFT buying Nokia. This one can and will be debated till the cows come home. It essentially always needed to happen – why now? Is it about Ballmer stepping down and Elop coming home. I don’t know but I think MSFT has a huge uphill battle to make Windows Phone competitive but apart from them – it is all android and iOS, so I do hope MSFT can shake it up a bit cause it will be good for the ecosystem.

    Stoked to be mentoring over at http://jfdi.asia this year. Should be fun and great learning experience for me.

    On the Spuul front – we just launched our biggest TV deal yet :: http://blog.spuul.com/2013/09/star-plus-serials-now-available-on-spuul/ . Lots more coming as well.

    All in all an exciting week locally and globally – now over to Apple for next week!