Sticker Mule built a social network from scratch
31 karma · joined June 12, 2010
Exceptional growth doesn't happen because you're great at a/b testing. It happens when your team is good at decision making period.
To take another contrasting opinion. Who cares if you know exactly why you're going. We know in a general sense why we're growing: we constantly improve the experience of our service and make customers happier.
It's quite hard to maintain aggressive year over year growth targets. If you're pulling it off it really doesn't matter if you figured out why via a/b testing or not.
Obviously, we'd prefer stronger YOY growth without knowing the exact causes than weaker YOY growth because we wasted resources on a/b testing to get precise answers to why we're succeeding.
Beyond that, I wasn't referring to trending growth via GA to see if you're making good decisions. You can trend conversion rate by channel to see if you're getting better over time. Obviously, if conversion is going up and to the right for most channels you're making good decisions.
The biggest point being #1: Resources are finite. Time spent on A/B testing cannot be spent elsewhere. How you use your time determines your growth trajectory. A/B testing is a growth tactic, but it's not always the best use of your resources.
There is absolutely no way to solve this problem. You'll always have a trade off to make when it comes to how you spend your resources and time. You shouldn't neglect that cost when deciding if a/b testing is necessary for your organization.
Btw, keep in mind, I admit we still do some a/b testing. It's just not an key component of our growth strategy.
The point of the article isn't to say a/b testing doesn't work or shoudn't be done. It's simply to say many companies are mis-using their resources by following the standard thinking on a/b testing.
We could spend another month figuring out how to get better at a/b testing or we could spend our time on another activity that produces a higher return on time spent. It turns out that's what we did and the return has been much better.
A solid a/b testing process doesn't just happen without time & effort. You need someone smart analyzing user behavior and forming hypotheses as well as a talented design team to develop concepts that test them.
We simply acknowledged the costs of doing a/b testing well and decided our resources are better spent elsewhere.
On the contrary, quite a few similar organizations do exist, but only when a government monopoly doesn't kill competition in that space. For example, who in the 90s would have guessed that something like TrustE would exist. It's not that far fetched to imagine that if government wasn't policing restaurants a private organization could exist to provide such a service. Yelp doesn't do that because it's not their mission and no one is going to make that their mission since the government already monopolized that job.
I'm not saying we should have 0 government either, but if we're not willing to question the necessity of things as trivial as local government health inspectors then where do we draw the line?
Just to clarify:
"A straw man is a type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position"
You misrepresented my position. I chastised you for not responding to what I said, but that is not the same as misrepresenting your position.
I see your point.
What's the point of commenting if you're just going to name call and divert attention from the original conversation using straw men?
If you really care about people and what's best for society you'd act differently. Granted, 2 people chatting on HN don't matter much, but why even to comment if you don't give a damn about anything other than protecting your current set of beliefs?
Have a look at: http://www.bbb.org/
If people wanted a health inspection organization to rate restaurants it'd exist. Since the govenrment already monopolized that field it doesnt. Okay, it sort of does, it's called Yelp.
Anyways, the point is pretty clear, we have all sorts of "trust" systems on the Internet to verify everything from privacy (Truste) to security (Verisign, etc.). People can create these types of organizations on their own without government and will if they actually do something useful.
The problem is, owning a company worth $5,000,000 doesn't mean you necessarily have $2.5 mil in spare cash laying around.
For this reason, estate taxes encourage businesses to go public so that they can convert the value of their business into liquid assets enabling their estate to easily pay taxes. Or, if going public isn't an option, often the estate needs to sell the business to a larger corporation.
End result is, these smaller $5 - $20 million dollar corporations disappear when the founder dies and they morph into bigger, lifeless enterprises. That's not to say all small businesses are great places to work, but if you ever talk to people that work for founder ran enterprises vs. shareholder ran enterprises there is often a significant difference in quality of life and in how the owners treat their workers.
Estate taxes kill small businesses and also raise very little revenue.
You're perhaps right, people will one day "demand regulation" because that's what happens when countries get so wealthy that politicians can't pander on bigger issues and instead start making big deals out of smaller ones (i.e. we'll protect you from unhealthy restaurants). Not to mention, like all organizations, governments fight to continually grow. Unlike corporations, governments can't go out of business (easily) and have the support of misguided do-gooders.
Europe is going through this right now. They developed before the United States and they are declining before us as well due to the excess of government.
Finally, to claim economic growth in China is "abusive" is to show total disregard for the poverty of the people living in the country. China is still an incredibly poor country and economic growth is helping move millions out of poverty every year. Would you prefer slower growth and more poverty?
In China, far more people die from a lot of things because the majority of the country still lives in poverty. Lack of government regulation is why they are one of the world's fastest growing economy and economic growth is the main engine for solving their health issues.
Most of the developing world does not have health inspectors monitoring restaurants because it's not that important of a thing to do.
The lack of food regulations in China made it possible for lots of amazing restaurants to exist because local people don't worry about regulations. If they want to sell you food, they just do it. Somehow, society manages to exist in this manner and it's actually quite nice.
Password Management: http://passpack.com/
Stickers: http://www.stickermule.com/ :-)
What exactly are you studying? Human willingness to gamble their money away based on the potential that the thing on the other end is really a stupid bot?
Another really bizarre aspect of your site is the use of Adsense. If this is supposed to be a real business why attempt to make some small pocket change off Adsense? It's really quite confusing.
These things all add up to make you seem untrustworthy. 3 things to do:
1. Clarify your purpose. 2. Clean up the design. 3. Get rid of Adsense.
Unless you're a content site that is living off ads it makes no sense to have Adsense. Given that you're running a gambling site, the inclusion of Adsense just makes it seem even more obvious that you have this naive get rich quick ambition.
Says who and what are those reasons? I suspect the reasons are: old people got scared and stakeholders saw an opportunity.
Luckily the Internet is mostly protected from scared old people and powerful stakeholders.
Maybe in another decade when we're all older we will be willing to give up the freedoms we once enjoyed when the Internet was still young. And it will be for "mostly good reasons."
Why don't the founders who cashed in put up some of their own money? What exactly was the purpose of selling if the founders are still broke and Reddit is hovering around break even?
And he wants to earn north of $75k? Why? Because he read a lot of history books? And he's arrogant enough to say this to the NY Times? He might as well put a stamp on his forehead that says "Arrogant bastard. Do not hire."