The New Early Adopter Trend: Shilling for Startups

In the last month or so Ive noticed an irritating trend in the startup world after adding my email to a launch page I get asked to submit a few of my friends emails in exchange for getting a higher place in line or earlier access. This has happened at least twice when I have checked out a startup after meeting an entrepreneur and two or three times after Ive spoken with a friend about a cool company and gone to check it out. I find it annoying, but its a trend that has blossomed, mostly because it appears to work.

Damian Kimmelman founder and CEO of DueDil, a financial information startup that is shutting down its social invite program as it opens up its beta to more people said the company saw its invite pool swell by a third thanks to folks sharing emails for their friends. But most important was the psychological effect Kimmelman felt it has on the invitees. In an IM conversation he said it helps prioritize users when you can only let a few people into a beta at one time and he added, [A]lso you are a free service, but you kinda want people to value the service from day 1.

He added that it was a short-term thing and only four or five people seemed upset enough to complain about the process.

Apparently his experience may become the norm. Justin Britten founder of Prefinery, a company that helps startups manage their beta process, said via email that at this time 45 of the companies using its software have turned on social invites since the company released the functionality in February. The feature encourages applicants to share news of the beta they just applied to on social networks including Facebook, Tw! itter, a nd Reddit. They can also pass a unique link generated for them via email. Britten writes:

In this time, 45 betas have enabled the social sharing feature and of these 45 betas a total of 2,125 testers across all 45 betas have shared their unique share link with their friends for a total of 28,214 unique clicks. These same 45 betas had a total of 6,827 testers over this period, meaning that 31% of all testers (2,125 of 6,827) were willing to share the beta with their friends on their social networks! This willingness is huge!!

Of these 28,214 clicks a total of 789 people actually applied for access to the said beta after clicking on their friends unique share link, yielding a conversion rate of approximately 2.8 percent.

This was so successful Prefinery has elected to enable its sharing feature by default; few betas choose to disable the feature, according to Britten. Another way to look at this however, is that in attempting to beta test an app the tester is willing to sell out their friends in the hopes that almost three people out of every hundred that he or she shares it with will also be interested enough to also try to sign up.

Im in the cranky camp on this one, but since its driving value for entrepreneurs using it, I suppose I should just get used to being asked to fork over my friends in exchange for earlier access to the next hot startup. I dont have to do it, but I do worry that an increasing part of being an early adopter seems to be a willingness to shill. Im not ready to live in a world where as Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook employee and entrepreneur, said in aBusinessWeek article The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. This viral world makes me somewhat sick.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription reqd):

IDrive Online Backup: Dont spend your time recovering from disaster.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Samsung asks ITC to ban the import of Apple devices

Image
The back-and-forth in the patent dispute between Samsung and Apple continues, with Samsung filing a request for a U.S. import ban against the iPhone, iPad and iPod, FOSS Patents reports . The complaint was filed with the International Trade Commission (ITC) on Tuesday. The ITC is a government regulatory body, which acts independently of the courts. Apple seems to be gearing up for a preliminaryinjunctionrequest in its legal case against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, but it hasnt sought any action from the ITC, unlike in previous cases against competing smartphone manufacturers such as HTC . Samsungs move is a clever way to beat Apple to a potentially hobbling import ban, since the ITCs decision is independent of the ongoing court case, and a final decision is reached within a fairly set time frame of 16 to 18 months, once the ITC agrees to investigate. Apple is likely to respond with a complaint of its own, according to FOSS Patents Floria...
Keep reading

China to make Tesla the next BMW

Image
Tesla's China business is booming Hong-Kong traded Tencent, a company best known for its WeChat messaging app, disclosed in a Tuesday filing that it's  taken a 5 percent stake in Tesla for $1.78 billion.  The investment follows Tencent's new stake in taxi-hailing app Didi Chuxing, which can be accessed through WeChat. "I think Tencent likely wanted exposure to a company that was growing very quickly in electric and autonomous" vehicles, said Tasha Keeney, an analyst on the  ARK Industrial Innovation ETF (ARKQ) , whose top holding is Tesla. "We think the autonomous mobility as a service market could be $10 trillion in gross sales globally by the early 2030s, and companies like Tesla or  Baidu  could take a cut of that," she said. Tesla declined to comment to CNBC. Tencent did not respond to emailed requests for comment. A Tencent spokesperson  told The Wall Street Journal  that "Tesla is a global pioneer at the forefront of new te...
Keep reading

Who Will Create iTunes for the Cloud?

Image
If youre like me, your digital media life is messy. If I were to take inventory of where all my digital media resides, the list would include Flickr, Facebook, iTunes, Android, Netflix, YouTube, Picasa, Flipshare, Amazon, Kindle, iBooks, Windows PC, Mac, iPad and so on. Like I said, a mess. And while Im an early adopter, Im probably not very different from tens of millions of consumers who face digital media anarchy every day across the various screens, accounts and software populating their life. Apple is the first company to even come close to helping us manage this chaos, with iTunes. After it was first introduced a decade ago, the service becamehugely popular partly because it was the first cohesive management tool for first music, then later other types of media. But iTunes has gotten flabby with age , and the creaking has gotten more noticeable lately as the cloud becomes more and more important for digital media storage. In a way, iTunes has become the Windows of consumer medi...
Keep reading