Godaddyrefund.me

Godaddy's Landrush Screw Up

So I woke up at 7:30AM to start bidding @ 8AM on .ME domains like everyone else did when the public domain land rush opened last week.

You can imagine I had a list of verbs, unusual urls and cool .me ending words and hoped for the 1000x returns that I wanted to make on the URLS.

So this is what happened:

8AM - I'm ready to start buying. The website is acting real slooooooowwwww.

It takes 45 mins of cart loading time to get my first batch through!!!! It was so slow it was unbelievable. During this time URLs were going in and out of 'unavailable' status as if godaddy had no idea as to what was going on.

8:45AM woah my first batch had gone through of premium URLs. Confirmations come through. Money removed from my bank account.

8:55 AM I got another batch through and confirmations come through to my email.

I continue to do this until around 10AM and I had topped my budget.

Later that day I get emails coming through saying that the URLs had been taken. All URLs had been rejected. How sad. Luckily I had pooled resources with a friend and we managed to get 1 premium together as a team.

So techcrunch then do their post on the matter and godaddy sent out an email saying we're all going to get a refund within 24 - 48 hours plus 5 - 7 days bank processing time. Jokers.

So now some of the refunds have come through. Luckily for me I made some money off the currency move in the mean time between spend in UKP to USD and refund in USD to UKP - it was minimal though.

Godaddy's Prebid Screw Up

So I bid on some domains to get into the private bidding process earlier this year. A similar experience was faced but everyone kept quiet to reduce the competition for domains at the time. Godaddy had also gone through the same process of taking our money then having to refund us later. However, some sources believe that godaddy employees had been hot picking off the best URLs for themselves. All the evidence pointed to this.

More interestingly they also issued login IDs for each individual URL auction. So we had tons of Usernames to use. We had to reset the passwords then change our passwords in a 'ballsed up' long winded process. They then, due to complains, sent out a new process where by our bids were consolidated into one login ID. If only they were using clickpass.

Godaddy Bid Mechanics

Unfortunately, because my bids are coming up soon I can't explain how the mechanics of the bidding work fully. From the way the system is setup though. I can tell various pieces of useful information about the bid (e.g. predicted end price, best time to bid, bid strategy, max bid price I should bid, predicted number of bids). It's going to be exciting knowing this information. I am basically hoping to arbitrage between the privateness of the private godaddy auction (imperfect market) (e.g. imperfect buying) vs. the open market of sedo (near perfect market). So thats the theory. If you want to supply capital and be part of this - email me. I'll tell you how it goes later....in the mean time I'm going to relax.me

Mapping Processes for Startups: Monetization

I'm a big fan of mapping out options for decisions that you have as a startup.

Using a google document spreadsheet we can start to do some basic analysis on various decisions or choices that a startup may face.

This post will attempt to describe some aspects of how to look into selecting a monetization strategy for your website. Sometimes its obvious how to monetize a technology and in many cases its not.

So here is the process:

1. Firstly brainstorm the monetization methods that you may be able to use - at this point don't kill any ideas. A place to start with this is to think in these terms:

• Advertising: Using advertising to generate revenue. E.g. CPC (selling traffic), CPA/affiliate sales (selling action), CPM (selling brand exposure) or a combination of methods.
  
• Subscription: Using a subscription model (freemium/premium) (selling service/access/data)
  
• PAYG: Pay as you go. Using some kind of pay per use model (selling a service/access/data)
  
• Non advertising commission: Commission based method. E.g. Paypal 3.5% cut of transaction (selling a service/access)
• Direct: Selling something directly whether virtual or real. (selling a product)
• Donations: Allow a community donation. (selling vanity/fear/pride/respect/vision)
  
• New Methods: Monetizing in a new ways (selling site engagement/interaction?, selling privacy?, selling identity?, selling social connectivity? )
  
• Combos: Combinations of the above. I.e. multiple revenue streams. [Useful for experimenting and gathering real data and useful when in growth phase and diversifying in search of larger profits).
  

2. Now take these specific 'monetization methods' that you have generated and analyse them using the following fields (using the spreadsheet) filling out the fields with low, medium, high where relevant:

• Description- Write a brief description of the monetization method
  
• Technology required - What kind of technology is required to achieve this. Do you have these skills in your team? Can you get them in?
  
• Product orientation changes - How much do we have to change your 'web product' by in order to make the monetization method work? Do we need new features on our site/widget/platform/technology/etc?
  
• Critical mass required - Do we need to have a critical mass of users in order to get this monetization method to work? Does the method scale better as we get more users. E.g. a market place like ebay. Or does this method scale flatly e.g. no market place.
  
• Time required for implementation - How long will this method take to implement in terms of company time?
  
• Ease of implementation - How easy (excluding the provision of time) is it to make this method?
• Consumer annoyance factor - Do we impair the customer experience by this method and by how much? Banner ads all over the place is one extreme example here. E.g. if twitter were to try to monetize and starting adding ads to feeds or your site - people would complain.
  
• Partner annoyance factor - if we are working with a partner/s do we annoy our partner with our monetization method. If so, by how much?
  
• Exposure - How large is the exposure of this method. E.g. a banner on the front page affects all your users. V.s. Freemuim models offer more exposure to the power users of the site. For advertising methods this can be quantified in terms of pageviews, uniques etc. You want to be high but targeted correctly.
  
• CPC/CPA/CPM revenue potential - this is more advertising specific but try to put some predictions down so you can compare monetization methods.
  
• Contextualisation rating - Is this monetization method contextualizable and to what degree. E.g. there is no point making a freemium model on a site like moneysavingexpert.com as the users are there to learn about saving money. There use affiliate cuts instead. On the other side of the coin Snaptalent are doing great stuff with facebook ads.
  
• Adverse effects on the distribution/growth of your site/widget/etc - a subscription model won't work well on a widget because it would probably kill the distribution effect of the widget. E.g. Subscription model is bad for sites that rely on a market place to grow. Ebay do this now that they have their market but only on the powerusers. E.g. it wouldn't make sense for Zilok to charge a subscription while they are in their growth phase. Much better to use a percentage cut of the sale.
  

3. Now that you understand a bit more about your options, now try to map the value proposition that your site/widget/app/etc has; to the monetization route that you think are candidates. For example:

• If your site makes a process easier then a clear monetization method candidates would subscription, advertising, PAYG.
• If you sell direct sell product that is innovative to the market (then you can charge directly for it).

Other thoughts:

• Make your monetization method work for you in a competitive sense
• Disrupt your competition and create competitive advantage by using a different monetization method than what is normally used in that industry.
• If you are going for multiple monetization methods, you may want to check the compatibility between them and such for the best group effect on revenue/the other factors.