Digerati Marketing is one of those seo blogs I like, and which are never updated 
Anyway, this guy coded and published a program, called autostumble.
What it does, is that you simply remain logged in to stumble, and you have the program running in the background. The program coordinates all the clients, to stumble each other’s pages automatically.
Cute, fast, and brilliant.
But he killed the idea. How? By charging for it.
Sure, 10$-15$ are nothing, of course. But it kills the viral growth of the program. And due to the network effect, the program practically lives off its viral growth.
The network value of a product/service is equal to the number of clients to the power of 2. Meaning, 2 clients consist a value of 4 network, 4 clients consist a value of 16 network.
Its like fax, email, cellphones and instant messengers. If noone has it, its worthless. If many people have it, the value of the network grows exponentially, and after it hits a certain critical mass, no one can believe how they used to live without it. It’s hard to make it grow at first, and the growth is small. But after the critical mass is achieved, you got an unstoppable explosion engulfing everything around it.
For real machines or products, its hard to give it away for free, unless you are Sony or Nike. But for intangibles, like a software, its dumb not to give it away for free.
Do you believe ICQ or Messenger or Skype would ever gather the critical mass required to break the barriers of their network value, by not being free?
Don’t sweat on it, the answer is a big fat NO.
By charging for a service or product, that depends on its network value, even if its a trivial amount of money, you kill it right from the start. You are better off not starting the project alltogether.
“But how will I make money off it? I paid for development! I spent months on it! I paid for marketing!”
You can always find a way to make money out of something popular. ALWAYS. But work on making it popular first, then monetize it.
To stay on our example, a quick, dirty and fucking easy way to monetize the autostumble product is to make an image gallery (one that is already tried and appeals to the stumble audience) and put up a pay per impression banner. Then just add every page of that gallery to the autostumble queue, and voila, here is your money. No charges for the users, no obstacles for the virus to stumble on (pun intended), and the creator has some money on autopilot.
But nooooo, you just have to charge even a small amount of cash for it. Go ahead, kill the virus. Fail miserably. Who cares.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
September 12th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Does this mean you want a free copy?
Fail miserably? Kill the virus? A poor attempt at a Godinish post, my friend. The £20 acts as a barrier between users who understand the product and the droves and droves of noobish blackhats who would poison the system with their viagra spam and cheap hubpages and lead the the whole network being uprooted and shut down.
Epic Fail?
“Total Votes Swapped (Live!): 268,307″
Over quarter of a million stumbles swapped in a matter of months.
September 12th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
So you are telling me, that right now, I cannot register auto stumble, and start submitting my crappy viagra spam and cheap hubpages?
I do not see how a 20 pound cost prevents someone from abusing the system. Even noobish blackhats can afford 20 pounds. If that is the only measure of protection for the system, then it seems weak.
Congratulations on the quarter million stumble exchanges though
It really is a great idea for a network based product.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
You’d be surprised – don’t be too quick to lay down judgement on a model you haven’t tried. AutoStumble has close to 1,000 *active* members. I imagine it would be ten times this if the product was free.
£20 puts off a lot of people for every good blackhatter there’s one thousand bad ones and it’s these kiddies I don’t want polluting the system.
If you understand how StumbleUpon works, you will know that even if you do enter a Viagra page or crap page into AutoStumble, it won’t go viral – SU has 6,000,000 or so members so you need thousands and thousands of votes to make something go viral, AutoStumble just gives you the edge over the competition and a nice headstart, it doesn’t run on magic and pixie dust.
Charging £20 makes people bother researching what SU is and how it works before they make their purchase decision.
Making it free would bring about the “what the hell, might as well try it approach” and lead to everyone’s accounts getting banned.
If people do submit crap/porn/spam I email them with suggestions, because there’s no point in them doing it – it won’t work. I’m also working on a URL filtering mechanism to filter out those who post crap algorithmically.
I’m a little miffed at your post, calling my system a failure, when if you do your research (such as: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-tools/17252-auto-stumble.html) you will find loads of people reporting the success they have had with the system.
I am fully aware that the effectiveness of the program is directly proportional to active users, which is why I scaled the price point and *gave away for free* over 200 accounts to various SEOs who were enrolled with other programs. For instance, I gave all members of Eli’s (from bluehatseo) SQUIRT, a free copy.
So, the initial launch was totally free, then I charged £10 then I hit 500 users and now charge £20.
I understand the point of your post and I agree with it, but I’ve done most of the things you say here… So…. Great, but pick someone who deserves a bashing
September 12th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
” I imagine it would be ten times this if the product was free”
That was the point I was trying to pass in my post. Please understand that your software was an example. I have nothing personal with you, on the contrary, I like your posts.
“If people do submit crap/porn/spam I email them with suggestions, because there’s no point in them doing it – it won’t work. I’m also working on a URL filtering mechanism to filter out those who post crap algorithmically.”
Ok, so this is the true protection method. Sounds pretty good.
“I’m a little miffed at your post, calling my system a failure”
I was misunderstood here. I was “talking” to entrepreneurs who say: “But how will I make money off it? I paid for development! I spent months on it! I paid for marketing!â€
I wasn’t referring to you. I was replying to hypothetical (but common) narrow-minded software developers.
Actually, you have convinced me to test your software.I will give it a try soon
April 27th, 2009 at 10:51 am
As a Newbie, I am always searching online for articles that can help me. Thank you
September 1st, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Thanks for the news, I really didn’t know about it yet though I normally keep my eyes wide opened.