Author Archives: Andy Boyer

Seattle Craigslist Alternative

Posted by Andy Boyer in Entrepreneurism, Seattle

Seattle Craigslist is a favorite place for millions of people to buy and sell used items online.  As they say in their tagline, Seattle Craigslist “provides local classifieds and forums for jobs, housing, for sale, personals, services, local community, and events.”

 I’ve recently come across an alternative to Seattle Craigslist, at www.bonanzle.com.  (Full Disclosure – I like their idea so much, I am helping them with some marketing.)

While Seattle Craigslist is simply a text based classifieds section, Bonanzle is built on Ruby on Rails, and offers easy image upload, advanced communications between buyers and sellers, easier ways to create stores, and a host of other useful features.

So if you use Seattle Craigslist, and are looking for an alternative with more bells and whistles, check out Bonanzle, and let me know what you think.

Seattle Craigslist Alternative Bonanzle

Behind the Scenes at an Original Planning Meeting for the White River Amphitheatre

Posted by Andy Boyer in Personal, Seattle

I recently attended a show at the White River Amphitheatre.  I was curious how the thing was conceived, so I found some notes from an early planning meeting….

——————-

(Setting: Starbucks, 2001)

Melvin: Well, Tommy,
Carline, you say you have a proposal for the new outdoor concert venue?

Tommy: We do.  Can we show it to you now?

Melvin: Please do.

Carline:
Thanks.  We couldn’t get our printer to
work, but we sketched it out on these napkins.  Will that work?

Melvin: Perfect – not a
problem at all.

Tommy: So first off,
thanks for the opportunity.   We have
really thought about this a long time. 
And after careful review, we think we have the perfect location for a
concert arena marketed to Seattle citizens.

Carline: Yes, the
perfect spot is………..halfway between Auburn and Enumclaw.

Melvin:
I’m intrigued.  Please explain.

Tommy:  Well you see, Seattleites never go to Auburn
or Enumclaw.  They have this impression
that it is either too rural, or too far away. 
By forcing people to attend shows down there, we will raise the profile
of these vibrant towns.

Melvin: I see.  Now, I’m concerned about the fact that there
is only a single 2-lane road from Auburn to the proposed arena site.  Walk me through how this would work from a
traffic perspective.

Carline: Both Tommy
and I feel very strongly, that part of the problem with today’s society,
especially the young people, is that people are in too much of a hurry.  If you have one lane in, people will be
forced to take their time and really enjoy the camaraderie of being together.

Tommy: Yes, there is
an old proverb – “The joy is in the journey, not the destination.”

Melvin: Does that
tie into putting the arena on Muckleshoot land?

Carline:  Exactly.

Melvin: So that
proverb is Native American?

Carline:  No not at all.  We think it’s Buddhist.  But Buddhism originated in China, and India is
close to China.  Native Americans here in
the US have been referred to as “Indians.” 
So this ties together ancient teachings and wisdom of both
spiritualites.

Melvin: Yes, that’s
very moving.  Please continue.

Tommy: Plus, The traffic
situation will encourage carpooling, so every concert attendee will leave a
smaller carbon footprint on their way to the event.  And since they won’t be able to drive more
than 4 miles per hour, everyone will get much better gas mileage than if they
were driving on a freeway.

Melvin: That’s
really fantastic.  What about public
transportation?

Tommy: We kind of
figured that neither Sound Transit or local metro buses really want to deal
with crowds that may be drinking at the event. 
So again, having one way in and out makes a bus route unnecessary, and
even silly.  We were afraid that if we
build buses or trains into the transportation plan, we’d get pushback.

Melvin: Yes, that
was really smart.  Now, who would handle traffic
control?  Is that Seattle PD?

Tommy: Actually no.
SPD has a ton of experience organizing traffic flow around Mariners, Seahawks
and Husky games.  Do they really need to
handle anymore?

Carline:  I mean, it really isn’t fair.  When you think about it, the King County Sheriff’s
department doesn’t get any chances. 
Because SPD steals all the big gigs, the King County sheriffs have no
skills, competency or ability to handle traffic flow.  How
can they be expected to grow professionally if they are denied these chances?  It just – just – makes me so mad.

Tommy: We talked to
them, and they said if they had the chance to run traffic for this, in about
15-20 years they would have developed the intelligence and competency to handle a 5,000 person
event. 

Melvin: Well it’s
clear they deserve the chance to learn.

Carline: I’m glad
you feel that way as well.

Melvin: Do you think
that could create problems on the roads?

Tommy:  Well, we think we can alleviate some of the
road problems, if we make sure there are only 2 lanes out of the arena parking
lot.  If we limit it to let 2 cars out every 5
seconds, then that’s 24 per minute.  On a
night with 12,000 cars, it would take about 500 minutes to get everyone out.  That should really keep the roads from being
too clogged.

Melvin: That really
is clever.

Tommy: Carline, tell
him the best part.

Carline: Ooh, ooh.  This is
what I’m most excited about.  We can have
the King County Sheriffs direct people down different country roads, having
them wind around for no apparent reason, and completely devoid of logic. 
But from the air, what you’ll see is this amazing array of parking and
headlights that will create organic, wonderful shapes along the ground.

Melvin: That sounds
beautiful.  Will people like it?

Carline: Like it?!
They are going to love it.  Close your
eyes and imagine this with me if you will. 
You start the day with a 2-3 hour long drive with your close friends and
family, communing with each other through a marvelous journey of patience.  Then you enjoy music, art’s purest form.  The love spills out into the parking lot,
where you sit for hours reminiscing about the magic you have just been exposed
to, sharing your feelings with strangers and friends alike.  And then, on top of it all, you are
transported into a real life piece of living art.  You are now PART of the art of the evening,
one set of lights among a giant sea of red and white bulbs.  You are at the same time an individual, and
part of something much bigger than yourself. 
It will be truly nirvana like.

Melvin: Oh I’m
tingling just thinking about it.  How do
we staff the parking lots?

Tommy: Again,
embracing the art has wonderful business results.  In most lots, with multiple exits, you’d have
to hire people with reasonable skills in deduction, logic or basic
organization.  But in this set up, since
the art of chaos is the end-goal, we can hire a much different set of
employees.

Carline: Yes, we
felt that we need Yin and Yang together for perfect harmony.  And if the people attending the events can
afford expensive tickets, we needed poorer employees to balance that out.  We can employ anyone, regardless of
education, income, ability to speak, or really, even to see.  All they need to do is hold a flashlight and
point people towards nothing.

Melvin: So they
would offer no advice or facilitate the exit in any way.

Carline NO! THEY CAN’T!!!!!
I’m sorry.  But for the art to be truly
free-forming, people must be allowed to choose their own way.  They have to actively decide to get in the
line.  If they are told to skip the
lines, the entire chain would be broken. 
We can’t allow the employees to have the ability to be helpful at all.

Tommy: Plus, from an
economic perspective, this gives you the chance to hire people who really have
no other ability to work.  It’s very
socially conscious.

Melvin: I love
it.  Great for the soul, great for the
economy.  I gotta say, you guys are
really knocking the cover off the ball here. 
One last question.  I notice in
your design of the building itself, you have the stage amphitheatre face one
direction, with a closed back.  But then
you put all of the food and drink all the way behind the stage.  I’ve been to shows before where they put the
food courts high and far away, but in front of the stage, so people could walk up from their seats to buy food and drink and
still watch the show.  Walk me through
your idea here.

Tommy:  Well there are a couple of thoughts.  One, it’s really just rude to get
up and leave a performance and go order food and drink.  The artists train for years for this,  so we really don’t want to encourage people
to be distracted.

Carline: Also, we
have a severe problem with over-eating in this country.  We can cut down on the number of calories the
attendees consume, by making it nearly impossible to buy food.  You’ll also notice that there are not nearly
enough stands to accommodate everyone, and that buying food would require at
least a 30 minute wait in line.

Melvin: (Laughs) Oh
I noticed that – very savvy move.

Tommy: But I bet you
did not notice one other little part of the design.  There’s not enough storage to hold food to
feed 25,000 people.  So even if they
wanted to eat fattening food, were willing to walk behind the stage, AND wait
30 minutes, we have it set up so when they get to the front of the line, all
they can order is a coke.  You see, there’s
just no way to serve everyone.

Melvin: Wow, you are
right, I completely missed that.  And I
thought I had you guys on that one.  Well
played.

Tommy: Thanks.

Melvin: Last
question.  Suppose Seattle builds an
outdoor amphitheatre?  Would we suffer?

Tommy: We looked
into that.  An outdoor concert venue inside
Seattle proper is necessary, would be profitable, and could easily be part of a
larger overhaul to Seattle Center.  It’s
a project that makes sense both socially and fiscally, and would benefit
hundreds of thousands of people,  so
there’s really no threat that the City Council will ever consider it.  Right now, they are focused on self-cleaning
toilets that a few homeless people might use. 
That’s really more the kind of project they are interested in.

Melvin: Great
point.  Well I’ve seen enough.  Everything seems perfect.  When can you guy start work?

Tommy:  Well I need to talk to my mom, but Carline
and I get done with school at 2:40 every day. 
So, if one of our parents can drive us, we could be here by 3:00. 

Melvin:
Perfect.  Let’s get this project moving!

 

Real Life Deal or No Deal for the Blogosphere

Posted by Andy Boyer in Big Businesses, Entrepreneurism, Marketing, Media, Social Media

So how much are 2,200 women bloggers worth?   According to NBC, about 5 Million Bucks in Series B investment, which nets out to close to $2300 per blogger.

The deal includes the following:

As part of the arrangement, iVillage, Oxygen.com and BravoTV.com will feature select BlogHer content, while BlogHer’s network is expected to return the favor to varying degrees.

Reaching out to the BlogHer Network has been a common strategy of start-ups who don’t have $5,000, much less $5,000,000 for marketing.  The "Mommy Blogger," which as a term delights and disgusts different people, is an incredibly powerful evangelist for certain product groups.  The process involved digging through the network, finding the right email address, crafting a perfect message, sending an email, and praying. If it works, you get free promotion.  if it doesn’t, you burned a few hours.

But now it will be interesting to see what kind of influence the NBC buy-in will have on this network.  For one thing, I don’t know how much each individual blogger gets from this deal, but I assume it’s a negligble %.  It will also be interesting to see what happens to bloggers in the network if they rip on NBC programming, or promote programming of other networks.

Regardless, it’s a nice acknowledgment that the BlogHer network has become a powerful piece of the social media matrix.   Congrats on the investment.

 

Creative Pricing Based on Scarcity

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing

So we’re going back to making this a marketing blog rather than a place for me to be mad about losing the Sonics. 

If you read other marketing blogs, you probably have already come across this pricing strategy.  Seth Godin commeted on it, and it is an interesting concept for an online space – letting people choose how much they want to pay based on how "prestigious" they want their version of a product to be.

In this execution, it’s t-shirts.  Pay more money to get the #100 in the set than #1.  This artifically inflates the average price of the total shirt run.  (However, I’m not sure I understand why #1 isn’t the most expensive.)

I’m not sure how applicable that model is for mp3’s, software or anything else that you want to sell 100,000 of.  But is is similar to an industry in the UAE, where people bid on License Plate NUmbers  Here’s an excerpt from a good read:

Soft-spoken and modestly dressed, 34-year-old Al-Mannaei says he closely controls supply, releasing low-digit plates “almost scientifically.” The result, he says, is a frenzy for even mediocre numbers. In the last two auctions, three-digit plates fetched between $123,000 and $150,000 each, more than double the prices last fall. In the 10 auctions held so far, buyers spent roughly $120 million for 900 plates; the government plans to use the money to build a new trauma hospital for traffic-accident victims.

So I think the point is that we have a pretty untapped ability to start monkeying around with pricing models in the world of online selling.  And I haven’t seen anyone who has really nailed it yet, so there’s lots of room for good experimentation and clever ideas.

 

 

Rossi vs Gregoire Radio Ad War Begins

Posted by Andy Boyer in Media, Politics, Seattle

I love political season.  Nothing better than a good old fashion radio ad war being waged by people who don’t normally write radio ads.  Today on KJR, I heard what may have been the funniest 20 minutes of political radio the all-sports station has ever run. 

1) At about 8:20am, Steve Sandmeyer interviews Dino Rossi.  In the 10 minute interview, Rossi addresses the issue KJR listeners care about most, mainly the Legislature’s inability to make any kind of decision on the Sonics situation.  Rossi restated his previous positions, that all Gregoire and the Legislature had to do was AUTHORIZE King County to extend the current tax that tourists pay on rental cars, hotels, etc…past 2011 when it currently expires.  They didn’t have to vote to extend the tax, they had to vote to authorize King County to vote for the tax.  Rossi continued by saying that he knew it was a political hot potato, so to make sure Gregoire wouldn’t take a fall, he publicly endorsed it before her. That way she could endorse it without him being able to use it against her.  Then he got a nice jab in by calling Frank Chopp the “pseudo-governor” and that Gregoire is too afraid to do anything without his approval.  Score multiple points for Rossi.

2) Interview ends at 8:30 or so, and in the next commercial break, you get a response ad from Team Gregoire.  Basic text of the ad – “Rossi is like George Bush because he cut back on child protection services, is anti-abortion, votes against gay marriage and cut transportation funding.  See, he’s just like George Bush.  And did we mention he is like George Bush?  So, you obviously don’t want George Bush.  Paid for by friends of Gregoire.”  Gay marriage and abortion rights?  The Sonics have just been ripped from the city, fans blame you for this, and 8 days later you run an ad telling sports fans that Rossi is against abortion rights?  Really?  That’s the most compelling argument you have to make to sports fans feeling pain?

3) 10 minutes later, you hear a Rossi ad that has been playing a while. The ad quotes the Seattle Times, “Gregoire showed the leadership skills of a rookie Point Guard.” The ads also says that when Gregoire had a chance to do something extraordinary, she chose to sit on the bench.  Ouch.  Ouch again.  Score more points for Rossi.

4) As if this wasn’t enough, the Gregoire campaign found it necessary to run the same ineffective ad a second time 10 minutes later.  I guess they really wanted Sonics fans to know that Dino Rossi is anti-abortion.  It’s like walking into Capitol Hill and talking about policy on shipping tariffs.  Or going to the Apple farmers to discuss H1B visas.

The KJR vote is going to Rossi.  So I’m not sure Gregoire’s play here.  She either has to be loud and vocal about pushing through the new stadium legislation this session, or just ignore those voters and spend money somewhere else.  But if I won ana election by 2,000 votes, and an entire segment of people who never vote just learned how to register, I’d be nervous.  

Limiting Congress’ Right To Speak Online? This Can’t Possibly be True

Posted by Andy Boyer in Politics, Social Media

Ok, this link comes from Slashdot.  Reputable source, but one of those things that you read, then read aloud, then re-read to make sure you really understand it, and then finally mutter to yourself, and think about how much money you have in the bank and which island you could survive in with that amount of money. 

This report can’t possibly be true.  It must be some sort of misinterpretation.  But here’s a synopsis, along with the full report:

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi….. is scheming to impose rules barring any member of Congress from posting opinions on any internet site without first obtaining prior approval from the Democratic leadership of Congress. No blogs, twitter, online forums – nothing.

Someone tell me this is all a mistake.

What If…. Google Hadn’t Bought YouTube?

Posted by Andy Boyer in Big Businesses, Marketing, Media

Adotas has a story today about Google’s problems monetizing YouTube. 

If you remember, Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.7 Billion, which after complex calucaltions, came out to be a multiple of about $1.7 Billion.  That’s not true, they made some money, but the valuation was shocking.  Revenue this year is estimated to be $200 Million.  A fine amount of money. 

But, my goodness the costs must be enormous.  How many trillion streams are they broadcasting at what processor and bandwidth cost?   Wikipedia estimates $1 Million per day on Bandwidth alone.

So now imagine for a second that Google had not bought YouTube, and allowed it to lose money at an astonishing rate.  If YouTube was currently running around the investor community asking people to pony up money to fund the TV watching habits of the next generation.  At some point, the bleeding would have to stop.  Imagine some new scenarios for owners of YouTube:

  1. Comcast:  *Poof* All of a sudden it’s a paid subscription channel, and no copyrighted broadcasts would make it to air.
  2. Microsoft?: YouTube becomes MSN Video
  3. An "Orbitz-like" joint partnership between Disney, Viacom, and General Electric: YouTube meets Hulu.
  4. Fox: The new MySpace Videos?

I guess my point is that next time you are enjoying some free entertainment, be happy YouTube was bought by a company who thought it was a cool idea, and would figure out how to make money on it 5-10 years down the road.

 

 

In a related story, signups for rugby leagues rose 143%

Posted by Andy Boyer in Media, Personal, Sports

You gotta wonder how a TV company can make this kind of blunder…According to the BBC:

New Zealand rugby fans watching a regular sports programme found themselves viewing hardcore pornography instead on Sunday afternoon.

Four minutes of pornography interrupted sports coverage on the Prime Television channel, after what a spokesman described as a distribution mix up.

The pornographic footage was meant for an adult pay-per-view channel. Instead, it found its way onto a regular free-to-air programme called "Grassroots Rugby".

Rival television channels reported that some viewers were angry about the broadcast, which may have been seen by children.

 

And yes, I am fully aware that when I run for public office someday, some crackpot reporter will Google my name and the word "pornography" and momentarily think he hit the jackpot…

An Economy in Chaos – Could It Be Good For Our Health?

Posted by Andy Boyer in Uncategorized

Here’s a debate some friends and I stumbled into. We were looking for ways that a bad economy could help us correct behaviors that lead to better long-term decisions. For example, if gas is expensive, we start looking at alternative sources of energy, or public transportation.

So in an economy where it costs us more money to drive places, where we have less money for disposable income, and more expensive food costs, we will have to change some spending habits. The question became, will we get healthier.

One argument is that with ridiculous gas prices, I’m more likely to walk to the stores that I need to buy things from. I may start walking to the bus stop and riding it to work. With less disposable income, the average American group of friends might skip a movie or night at the bar to go shoot hoops at the park, thinking that the $100 they would spend together on beers could be used more wisely.

But I can see the flip side as well. Depressed people may skip a night meeting up with friends in order to buy a $5 bottle of wine and never leave their couch. The $8 a pound they spent on turkey could be replaced with $.25 Top Ramen and $1.99 bologna. People could take an attitude of “This sucks, I’m going to sit at home and sulk.”

So I don’t know. I’d like to think that people will move to more urban centers, congregate at parks and places of shared interest, walk and bike places they normally drive, and feel like when all else that they can’t control fails, they can at least take care of themselves. Thoughts?