N 82 50 24 / Nat Arem Blog

This is a follow-up to Website Success: Part One.

Step Two: Developing the Idea.

Okay, so now you know to keep user inertia in mind. What to do next? First, don’t try to fight human inertia. As a general rule, don’t try to fight against the natural tendencies of your audience. It isn’t productive and you won’t achieve success as quickly or reliably if you try to get people to do something they don’t really want to do. In actuality, you should learn to embrace human inertia. The question is, how do you do that?

In my mind, there is only one way to get people do things. Quite simply, it’s self-interest. Self-interest can mean a lot of things, but at it’s core it’s things that appeal to the basic human emotions; things like jealousy, curiosity, hatred, anger, surprise, etc. And as a subset, it’s anything that gives someone something they’re looking for, often as a derivation of the emotions listed before. While that may seem obvious, lots of websites ignore this concept. There are many branches of the self-interest tree and the one (or few) that your website chooses to go down should be relevant to the content you have on hand. Let’s look at a few examples.

First, Google. Why is Google so popular? It’s a shockingly simple concept. They deliver the most relevant search results. Anyone who thinks it’s anything else is fooling themselves. Sure gmail and other products are great too, but Google is completely and utterly reliant on search engine quality. If someone ever finds a better way to do search, Google will ultimately be crushed unless they can adapt their index to meet the best available search engine at the time. And in the end, that’s because people are ultimately curious and impatient and they want the fastest way from point A to point B. Google is the best way for them to get there.

Second, Facebook. Why is Facebook so popular? Once again, it’s simple: curiousity, jealousy, etc. People love to check up on friends, show off to friends, etc. More so than anything, the Photos application has made Facebook what it is today. Knowing where and when you’re being tagged, along with the ability to find pictures of your friends is, simply put, completely targeted at human emotions. People can’t help but use it. THAT is compelling content. And best of all, it’s user-generated, AJAX-validated (ie, it fills in names based on your existing friends list) and virtually maintenance free. It’s really the perfect idea for traffic generation.

Now, to a more poker-related idea. Think about PocketFives. What makes people consider P5s to be the 2nd most important/largest poker forum online? What did it do to separate itself from the rest of the mediocre pack to climb up into the 2nd spot behind 2p2 (which, quite frankly, breaks a lot of rules and achieves success anyway … although nowhere near the success it could reach)? It’s as simple as the rankings. Everything on that site stems from the rankings. First, despite what they may say, 90%+ of top online tournament players want recognition. They crave being admired, having railbirds and getting threads posted about them when they go deep. I don’t blame them — it’s how we, as humans, work/think/operate. The P5s rankings are the perfect content piece to bring the best online tournament players to the site. Having the best online tournament players posting on your site brings in the crowds. Bring in those crowds and you have the valuable traffic that all of the poker forums look for. As a result, all of the other poker forums are an afterthought in the non-2p2 market. Sure those other forums might make money and they might have decent traffic, but they missed a golden opportunity for unique and first-to-market content. That one piece of content was enough to overcome the inertia involved in getting people to sign up for a forum and to come back daily.

To wrap this post up, what can we learn from this? Well, for one, this inertia in human nature can be overcome. Also, we can see why it’s so necessary to appeal to human emotions and desires. What you also might be realizing now is that it’s harder said than done to come up with a product and plan. But you’re also probably realizing that with the right level of thought and planning, you can turn nothing into something with a reasonably high degree of success.

To be continued.

Nat :: Feb.24.2008 :: General :: 3 Comments »

As always, I feel like I have to say some stuff before I make a post like this.

There are no hard and fast rules.  Don’t take what I say as such.  These are more like guiding principles that will get most people to where they want to get to.  Lots of sites will probably ignore some or all of what I have to say and they’ll still achieve significant success.  Moving on…

Step One: The Idea

Obviously you need to have an idea.  There are really simple ways to come up with ideas… think about what you’d like to have, but isn’t out there.  If you can’t think of anything, ask family and friends what they’d like or what annoys them about the web.  If you can’t come up with something doing that, then you probably aren’t meant to start a website.  In the poker community, let’s say someone says they want a really cool client program that looks a lot like FTP or Stars, but just has things like tournament schedules, poker email, poker IM, poker videos, hand replaying, tournament results (maybe fed from a site like thepokerdb), blog feeds, etc.  It’s a pretty obvious idea.  People like poker manager have done it, although I think everyone knows it could be done significantly better.  So you want to do it.  Now what?

Well first, that isn’t really a website, but we’ll continue with this example anyway.  The first thing I *always* think about with a product is “what is the user getting out of it”?  Or, more specifically, “what does the user think they’re getting out of it”?  Don’t think of your business as deception.  Think of it as an exchange.  Your job is to get inside the mind of your potential users and serve that set of people as best as possible while still making money.

For instance, with PSDollars, users say to themselves “great, I can get cash for these W$ that I don’t want to use”.  Sure there are people out there who say “well you could get more elsewhere” (obviously I know that) but put yourselves in the shoes of the user.

Here’s a scenario:  Users are on thepokerdb, they’re looking up a player and they win a satellite.  They can get $200 or whatever instantly for their T$215.  What if it’s 9 PM and they have a kid to put to sleep and a wife who is getting angry that they’ve been playing poker for four hours on a Sunday afternoon?  They don’t know about 2p2, other trading websites, etc.  They just want to get their $200 and send it to their ePassporte so they can use the $ for a few bills.

That particular user is thinking, this is by far the easiest, fastest and most reliable way for me to get my money.  Sure he could get another $10 somewhere else, but he doesn’t know that and he probably doesn’t even care that much.  Ignorance is bliss in so many situations.  For example, an incredible number of people use the actual AIM client because, quite frankly, they don’t care enough to look around for something better like pidgin or digsby.  Even the people using trillian don’t realize what they’re missing.  In fact, I’d bet most people who read this post are saying to themselves, what are those programs?  What’s better about them?  I’m used to what I have, reading about these is too complicated, I don’t want to switch.  That is exactly the type of person you’re dealing with — always keep that in mind.  People have an irrational inertia within their minds and it isn’t like only stupid people are like that — it’s everyone, myself included.

So how does that all relate back to the client-side poker program?  Well, where’s the incentive for the user?  In the case of PSDollars, the incentive is that the user needs the money.  In the case of thepokerdb, the incentive is that people like to a) look themselves up, b) brag to their friends, c) look up other people at the table and possibly most importantly d) try to help themselves make a decision in a tough spot.  So with those two sites, once you realize what people are thinking, you can provide exactly what they’re looking for and, in theory, succeed relatively easily.  With the program we’re discussing, what are they really getting out of it?

Even though I listed off those ideas at the top as if they were good, I’m convinced a bunch of them aren’t.  Things like a poker IM client are pretty retarded in my opinion.  Why would anyone switch?  Do you really plan to outdevelop Microsoft, AOL, Google and Yahoo?  If so, good luck to you sir.  What would EVER compel someone to enter into competition with those people?  It just doesn’t make sense.  People have established buddy lists on all sorts of IM clients and they aren’t going to switch to yours just because it has some sort of poker theme to it.

Or what about poker email?  That’s a terrible idea too.  Despite the fact that Gmail was the class of the web email industry when it was released (and it still is imo, even though others have gotten better), Hotmail and Yahoo Mail still dominated the web mail industry on a numbers basis.  No one is going to switch to some two-bit email operation where they’re scared of people having access to their passwords and private information.  It’s just silly to do something like that.

There are lots of other problems with the idea that I listed, but that’s not the important thing.  The important thing is that when you want to develop a business, you can brainstorm easily.  But before you say, “oh, great, 10 out of 12 people said this was a good idea” be sure to think it through.  What would you include?  Why would people use it?  Would you use it if you saw it mentioned in passing on a poker forum?  Get inside the minds of your users and never forget that you’re fighting irrational levels of inertia.

I’ll continue this discussion in future posts.

Nat :: Feb.19.2008 :: General :: 5 Comments »

Lots of people have been asking me on AIM/MSN/Google Talk/Yahoo!/etc about how Costa Rica is going… the answer is pretty well.  Some things are good, some things are coming along kinda slowly, but on the net of things I’d say that this has been a great trip.  There are a ton of exciting opportunities for me here and I’m strongly considering buying a place here and moving here on a 90%+ basis for at least a few years.  Granted there are a number of hurdles to be cleared before I do that, but I think there’s at least a 50% chance that I will end up being here for a significant percentage of time.

I would love to discuss all of my ideas for things to do in the poker world, but I just don’t really think it’s the smart thing for me to do.  My blog is just too public and someone with bad intentions will see it and rip off my ideas.  That really ruins it for all of us because I’d love to bounce a lot of this stuff off of the blog readership and see what people do/don’t like.  I’m basically relying on my gut feelings for what people will and won’t want to use.  Hopefully I’m right. 

That being said, I’m kind of tired of the lack of content on this blog.  I want to write more meaningful posts about things that I feel like people would either learn something from, be entertained by or find some other value in.  I’m thinking I might write a few articles on my general theories for how to come up with ideas for businesses, particularly in the online poker industry.

Lastly, I’m in this Pacific beach area of Costa Rica called Manuel Antonio right now.  It’s got one of the best views I’ve ever seen off of this balcony.  I brought my camera, but forgot my memory card!  It’s tilting me right now that I won’t be able to get pictures of this place for the readers.  It’s really incredible.  Maybe I’ll figure out some solution for taking pictures out here, even if it involves a disposable camera and scanning them in later.

Nat :: Feb.16.2008 :: General :: 3 Comments »