Kevin Ohashi

What is Gift Lizard? It's a gift shopping site where you describe the person you want to buy a gift for using tags. It helps you discover interesting and awesome gift ideas.

First Off, The Numbers for Gift Lizard

11,870 Visits (11,509 Uniques)

15,984 Pageviews (1.35/visit)

24 Seconds Average Time on Site

89.20% Bounce Rate

96.96% New Visitors

75% US Traffic

54.60% Chrome / 34.03 % Firefox / 3.89% Safari / 1.83% Internet Explorer

Failures

Facebook

Fail. I did, so can you. I created a Gift Lizard fanpage and invited my friends. I got maybe 4 likes from messaging ~600 people? My facebook status did better and got 15 likes and 12 comments, 2 shares and someone posted it back to me. Not bad, but total facebook traffic for the week: 105 visitors, almost all from the status. Fanpage is probably a more long term benefit.

Twitter
I know some traffic came from here, but it doesn't actually show up on my logs once. Nothing big enough to notice any substantial traffic coming from the 12 or so tweets broadcasting the site.

Reddit Advertising
It's only run for 1 day and there has been no a/b testing. I am still running this ad with the copy:

“Gift Shopping Made Easy! Describe the recipient and instantly get gift suggestions tailored just for them.”

It generated 44 clicks of 71,551 impressions on 26,877 different users. However, those users had 1 minute 54 seconds average time on site and only a 37.14% bounce rate. Better users, incredibly small volume. I also got some fantastic feedback from one particular user about some ways to improve the site that I was unfamiliar with.

MVP Launch

I launched with an MVP (minimum viable product) and there is a lot of things people didn't like (and still don't like!). The interface isn't as good as it could/should be to make it clear how the site works with tagging. There are still bugs in the way it behaves and improvements I know I should be making. But the site does function and I fixed major problems as the came along as best as I could. Other more structural problems are still there and probably won't be solved before the end of the holiday season.

Those are some of the biggest failures and problems I ran into when launching.

Successes

Finding a marketing strategy that works and can be replicated is hard. But I think I've found one.

My original plan of finding 'good' gifts and tagging them across multiple categories was well meaning but it was/is highly subjective and hard to scale. I will still add gifts in targeted popular categories, but that's not where I will spend most of my time.

I realized that niches were far more engaged in their very specific interests and more likely to interact with something targeted than a blanket message about finding gifts.

To that end I tested my idea with a starcraft gifts page and posted it to starcraft subreddit. The thread received around 99 comments (about half were me responding). I engaged them in a constructive and inclusive manner adding any item they thought would make a good addition. It's also important not to be greedy, I want people to find good gifts and share it with their friends of similar interest (funnily enough some of the people's sites I linked also responded on the thread thanking me for promoting their products - and I was genuinely happy to to it!). The goal is creating a great collection of gifts for anyone who likes starcraft regardless of what site the product may be on or what type of relationship I have with that site. It was a HUGE success. The result was 10,494 visits this week to the starcraft page and I only posted it 3 days ago (so it's only 2 days worth of stats).

Fluke or repeatable?

The next day I decided let me try it for another niche and see if I can get a similar response. I created a World of Warcraft gift page and posted it to the WoW subreddit. The result was 1,143 visits to the WoW gift page. The article was more popular in terms of relative ranking (peaking at 5th versus around 12th for starcraft post) but the subreddit is a lot less active it would seem. The engagement was a lot lower, despite being only half the size, it received 10% the traffic volume. The gift collection was still relatively popular in its niche. Success! And it looks like the model is repeatable and possibly scalable.

This massive influx of traffic from one social media site was nice. A secondary effect was linking and stumbles (I got no facebook likes or tweets from these it would seem).

StumbleUpon generated 134 visitors though from one person stumbling the page and setting off a chain of stumbles presumably. Content was sticky enough to be shared and promoted. Success!

Someone even bought me 1 month of reddit gold for the starcraft gift page (thanks anonymous stranger <3)

Finally, email lists worked well. I am on a couple mailing lists and sent a message out to them, the more personal and connected you are and/or your message are, the better it worked out. My co-working space had an amazing response. I saw people browsing it all day and they would come up to me and give feedback (and even bought a few things! <3 Affinity Lab)

Lessons Learned:

• Easier to connect with a niche audience.
• Don't be greedy and help others, it makes people like you.
• Launch it and fix it on the fly.
• Just because it's not perfect or even great doesn't take too much away if you have great content/value.
• Google Analytics is mesmerizing (that's going to have to be another post!)

What I would do differently:

Facebook Event in conjunction with a facebook page. I would like to try creating an event and invite everyone to it announcing the launch. Events are stickier I think because the user has to either acknowledge it to remove it or ignore it for a long time while it shows up. Of course the risk is you may only get one chance with this strategy because users may ignore event invites from you. High risk, high reward. I'd choose who I sent the event invite to carefully.

Link directly on social media sites, it may seem like a less popular idea, but I posted to a few subreddits as comments to get feedback (design_critiques, startups, twoxchromosomes) and it generated very little interest or traffic. I think direct links, when possible, are a better idea if you can communicate effectively in the short title.

Happy to hear thoughts, feedback, questions, ideas, your stories or anything else you wish to share!

I would advise anyone thinking of an .xxx domain to reconsider. Although you can register the rather pricey domain (~$95 a year) The ICM Registry are in full control of whether or not the domain resolves.
According to their website you need to register as part of their 'sponsored community'. 'Fair enough' you say, 'where do I sign up'? Well you can't. At least not until the ICM send you an email with a valid link to a sign-up form. What they don't tell you is when you will get that email, and no amount of emails to ICM will enlighten me either. For me it has been seven days so far. Meanwhile the domain is earning me nothing and the registered year ticks along.
When will I get the email? Two months, three, never? Who knows. All I know is this is a very shady practice and I would stay the hell away.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/nattk/the_great_xxx_con/

Yesterday I launched http://www.GiftLizard.com

Gift Lizard let's you describe the person you are shopping for and it makes recommendations based
your description. It's a more natural and free way to search for gifts because you don't need
to know what you want to buy for them but can get customized suggestions for the giftee.

The story behind the idea is kind of interesting. I was at Startup Weekend a couple weeks ago
and I didn't join a group on the first night. I went home after a long night at the bar and woke
up before my alarm clock with this idea in my head. It was a unique experience waking up with an
idea stuck in my head (and being up at 6am without an alarm going off).

So I quickly wrote it down on my idea pad and went back to the event. I started designing a mockup.

I showed a few people and we decided to work on it as our weekend project.

The final result was interesting, but it wasn't exactly what I had imagined. I didn't think much
about it for the next week or so. But eventually I realized I couldn't let it go. I had to build
my vision out or I wouldn't be satisfied that I had at least tried.

So yesterday, I launched Gift Lizard.

Instagram Engineering Challenge: The Unshredder
"Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to write a simple script that
takes a shredded image in as input and outputs an unshredded and reconstituted image."

So here's the sample image:

We're given the information that the slices are 32 pixels wide each, so I don't actually
address finding slices.

My Solution Process

Disclaimer: I've never really worked with images before and have little to no
knowledge of the research and techniques often used in this area.

The challenge appears to be figure out the best way to put pieces back together.

My first thought was I can sample X pixels from each edge of a slice, grab the RGB
value of each pixel and compare the difference.

The reasoning behind this was RGB is the easiest way I can think of to compare
differences in colors between pixels. Sampling would hopefully make it faster.

I made one critical mistake, instead of comparing pixel to pixel, I calculated
total R,G,B on an edge and compared the sum of an edge instead of a difference.

I didn't understand why that was wrong until the example of a checkerboard was
given. If you had a slice on a checkerboard they would actually be equal on
average but very different on a pixel to pixel comparison.

So, I had to revise my solution to compare pixel to pixel on each slice against
its opposing slices. So left side of slice 1 was compared against right side of
all the other slices in the image. The logic being that the slices with the
least amount of difference between them probably fit together.

Almost. Something is wrong here. The striped building seems to throwing it off.
The striped building has the highest difference value of any left-right pairs.
So my algorithm kept putting it on the side.

How can I make the striped building fit together? I tried cheating and seeded the
proper right end image (slice 10) and the image constructed itself perfectly.

Well, the only solution I came up with was somewhat brute force in nature. What
if I try compiling the image with every slice as an edge and see what the total
computed difference of the image is?

Voila! The only way I could think to overcome this was proving the whole image turned
out better despite the high difference pair.

My code is publicly available on Github

I apologize if you actually read the code, it's a mess, there is a lot of testing going on, commented out code and things that aren't used in the final version. I thought it would be a good way to learn about ImageMagick and PHP's Imagick class (which is the worst documented thing I've seen on PHP.NET)

This was the expected, default even, outcome.

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
Please don't take it personally. The applications we receive get
better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number
of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot
of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group
to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that
we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall
just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

We're trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number
of interviews means it's practically certain that groups we rejected
will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate

It seems Godaddy has finally plugged a hole in its whois privacy system which allowed users to see the domain owner's email address domain (ie ****@kevinohashi.com) if they tried to retrieve passwords. Now it requires the user the enter that email address instead of verifying that the asterisked email address is in fact the proper domain associated with the account. I highlighted the fix in the image below. Privacy at Godaddy just got a little bit stronger.

Bad nerd humor is hilarious sometimes.

TechStars TV Episode 3 (around 15 minutes)

What happened: SocratED renames to Veri and gets the domain Veri.com

Transcript (might be a few mistakes, I went through 3-4 times to try and copy this word for word):

David Tisch: Socratic + Education = crap name

Founder: Seeing how no one was able to pronounced our old name, SocratEd, we thought it might be a good idea to move to a much shorter 4 letter domain that meant something, so we moved to veri.com

David Cohen: That's a good name, veri being truth.

Fred Wilson: four letter domains? impossible. you can't get a four letter domain.

David Tisch: where did they get the money for that is the first question I asked?

David Cohen: so here is the crazy thing, Lee has owned that domain for the past 6 years.

Fred Wilson: There you go. They are the team of that week for that alone, that's going from the out house to the penthouse.

I thought this was interesting for a couple reasons.

From a startup perspective, it's interesting to see how impressed investors can be from a domain name. A strong domain truly does send a signal.

From a domainer perspective, it's shocking to realize that it stuns these investors that a startup has such a good domain. They don't think they have the money and it's not sure if they believe a company should be spending that money so early either on a good domain.

The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Social media are media for social interaction, as a superset beyond social communication. Enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques, social media substantially change the way of communication between organizations, communities, as well as individuals.

-Wikipedia

WTF does that even mean? The term social media with this definition is truly focused on media - how we are communicated to and are suddenly empowered to communicate back to the powers which use the media.

I was recently introduced to Amartya Sen's Liberal Paradox and found it quite interesting. The Wikipedia page does an ok job explaining it, I liked this article more.

Sen’s liberal paradox is meant to demonstrate that when autonomous agents act with complete freedom, it is impossible for the agents to produce an outcome that is a net improvement to everyone. While this is not to argue for government intervention, it is to say that a pareto optimal improvement and libertarianism cannot coexist. In other words, the paradox shows us that the invisible hand of the marketplace is incapable of producing net improvements in welfare for a given society.

When you think about the domain industry in the context of the liberal paradox it makes sense why everyone is so unhappy.