Gennaro Cuofano's Blog, page 268
October 16, 2017
This Is How I Got My Internet Privacy Back
Search engines are part of our lives. We use them and take them for granted. Not realizing that we are benefiting from an excellent service. In fact, by just typing our intentions through a search box, we’re able to find the answers to any question we have. Ancient Egyptian would have marveled to this feat if they could have used it to find information within the Library of Alexandria. Instead, today Google little crawlers venture through billions of pages to find what we need in less than a second. A feat that a human mind would never be able to achieve.
What happens when you search something?
Each day over two billion searches, go through Google. Many of the people who search are looking for something personal. Imagine a person on her laptop, which suddenly found out to have cancer, and she looks through the internet to find out more about that. Yet she doesn’t want other people to know.
The day after at the office, while using the work computer with her Google account, she is surfing the web with other colleagues. Suddenly an advertising related to cancer treatment pops up. The news about her disease has leaked. Because of that, she loses her freedom to decide when to let others know about something very personal.
That is an extreme example, but every day we submit dozens if not hundreds of searches through engines, like Google. Making sure that they do not record your data is crucial. Yet that is not the rule but the exception.
In fact, when you perform a search using a standard search engine you are sharing personal info. Moreover, the search terms are sent over to the sites you clicked on. Thus, when you search, you are sharing the search info not only with your search engine but also with all the places that you are visiting.
That is called search leakage. What do search engines see when you surf the web? And how can you prevent that?
Treat your IP like your SSN
Almost like the SSN (social security number) in the US, which is a string of nine digits that keeps track of all your vital life activities. The IP stands for Internet Protocol and it is a set of numbers linked to all your online activity. While you would never give your SSN to anyone – as this would result in a theft of identity – paradoxically you’re giving away for free each day your IP to standard search engines.
Another information that you’re sharing is the User Agent, which identifies the browser and device you’re using.
Through your IP and User agent you may be sharing the following information:
Age, sex, location, address.
Salary, last purchases, bank name.
Facebook profile, Twitter account, email account, social media tags.
Political tendencies, beliefs, medical conditions
Source: how-to-hide-ip.net
How can you prevent search leakage?
As explained on DuckDuckGo.com
At other search engines, when you do a search and then click on a link, your search terms are sent to that site you clicked on (in the HTTP referrer header). We call this sharing of personal information “search leakage.”
As we saw, the thing is you’re not only sharing that personal information with search engines but also with the websites where you land on. Apparently, that information may also be used to track you.
What about DuckDukcGo?
DuckDuckGo prevents search leakage by default. Instead, when you click on a link on our site, we route (redirect) that request in such a way so that it does not send your search terms to other sites. The other sites will still know that you visited them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand.
The same applies to search history and all the related information that can be found from the data that gets stored. To see it more in detail go to DuckDuckGo.
If you haven’t done it yet, switch to DuckDuckGo
The post This Is How I Got My Internet Privacy Back appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
Fifteen Smart Ways to Be More Productive with Duckduckgo
DuckDuckGo is a hybrid search engine, which does not track its users.
It has become my default search engine. The more I use it, the more I love it. Although at times I reverse back to Google I realize that is more of a habit.
In fact, DuckDuckGo offers quality results. Also, at times, the results I get from DuckDuckGo are more interesting from the ones I get through Google.
Use bangs!
Trying out DuckDuckGo but want a safety net?
Add !b to your query to search directly on Bing, or !a for Amazon, or !w for Wikipedia, etc. pic.twitter.com/YQiFvndF9w
— DuckDuckGo (@duckduckgo) August 10, 2017
First, bangs. In short, by inserting a website in the search bar anticipated by “!” it will give me back the page of that website with all the results for what I’m looking. For instance, I inserted in DuckDuckGo search box !tc. In short, I’m saying to look for all the info about DuckDuckGo contained in Tech Crunch,
I will land on a page within the target website which is a sort of search or category page,
Another exciting feature is the instant answers. Since the beginning, Gabriel Weinberg focused his effort on providing answers to users’ questions. What today we know as a featured snippet on Google. Is DuckDuckGo instant answer more efficient than Google’s featured snippet?
Get Instant Answers
The future of search is more and more about answers. Also with the advent of voice search, people will be talking more often with their websites and looking for relevant answers. In short, the time in which search engines matched keywords is slowly going to end. Gabriel Weinberg understood back in 2008 that answers were supposed to be the primary purpose of a search engine. When humans look for something, pose questions (even though Google taught us to think of keywords).
The answers coming from DuckDuckGo are called instant answers and come from various sources (they say over 400 in total).
You type in a question, DuckDuckGo matches and trigger the answer,
Source: docs.duckduckhack.com
That is how you get the answer you were looking for!
Get a Social media bio
Let’s say you want to get more info about a social media account, like twitter trough the search engine. You can search for the twitter handle like I did below:
Here another example. That is DuckDuckGo founder and CEO, which I suggest you follow.
Shorten and expand links
When sharing a link, it would be nice to shorten it to make it more appealing. You can quickly do that with DuckDuckGo.
For instance, I typed “shorten fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-vs-google,”
I generated a short link. Let’s say I want to reverse the process. Therefore, I want to expand it again.
Type “expand https://is.gd/UGmtYi” and get the expanded link again.
Generate passwords
Generating passwords too is pretty simple. Have DuckDuckGo create a password for you. You can also decide the length of the password by typing for instance “Password 20″ so that DuckDuckGo will generate a 20 characters password automatically for you.
Use the right syntax
Like Google, DuckDuckGo has a language. Following DDG syntax is helpful to make your search more efficient and get the results you are looking for. For instance, see below the syntax for DuckDuckGo
Source: duck.co/help/results/syntax
Keyboard Shortcuts to become a pro
You can also become way faster by using a few shortcuts:
Source: duck.co/help/features/keyboard-shortcuts
You can find the list of all shortcuts here. You can enable or disable keyboard shortcuts via the Settings page.
Make it yours by customising the appearance
One can customize the appearance of DDG as per your taste. You can find this in Settings > Theme or Settings > Appearance
This is how I customised my DDG fonts and style.
Get all the possible meanings
If you’re looking for all the possible meanings of something, search for it and then click on definitions. DuckDuckGo will return all the possible meanings it finds through the web!
What’s the weather in your town?
Before going out, don’t take risks. Ask DuckDuckGo how’s the weather outside!
Find cheat sheets to get 10x faster at anything
I love shortcuts because they make you become 10x quicker at anything. For example, when I was working as a financial analyst I used excel on a daily basis. When I learned how to use its shortcuts my productivity skyrocketed. I could get things done in less time and with better results!
Is a website Down?
Check if a website is down by asking it to DuckDuckGo:
Generate your QR code and share it!
I love QR codes. They are mysterious. For instance, imagine you convert an article in a QR code, as I did below:
You can then share that article and have people wonder what that is about! I find it another exciting way of sharing content.
#DuckDuckGo #QRCode pic.twitter.com/5keWppxGxW
— Gennaro Cuofano (@fourweekmba) October 9, 2017
Find the right HTML Code
If you’re not a programmer or developer DuckDuckGo is fantastic. It has a solution to any problem. Let’s say you can’t find the € sign code anywhere. Ask DDG!
Stopwatch
Another way to improve productivity is using your search engine as a stopwatch. Set an hour to focus on one task and let the stopwatch tell you when it’s time to switch task.
Putting it all together
DuckDuckGo is an excellent search engine, which doesn’t track you. If that isn’t enough, it also has a plethora of built-in features that allow you to do many fantastic and useful things. From getting instant answers to accessing a website without being tracked and checking the weather in your town, DDG got it all.
If you haven’t done it yet, go on and duck it!
The post Fifteen Smart Ways to Be More Productive with Duckduckgo appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
Fifteen Smart Ways to Be More Productive with DuckDuckGo
I’m crowdfunding my next book. Do you want to support it? Click on the cover below!
DuckDuckGo is a hybrid search engine, which does not track its users.
It has become my default search engine. The more I use it, the more I love it. Although at times I reverse back to Google I realize that is more of a habit.
In fact, DuckDuckGo offers quality results. Also, at times, the results I get from DuckDuckGo are more interesting from the ones I get through Google.
Use bangs!
Trying out DuckDuckGo but want a safety net?
Add !b to your query to search directly on Bing, or !a for Amazon, or !w for Wikipedia, etc. pic.twitter.com/YQiFvndF9w
— DuckDuckGo (@duckduckgo) August 10, 2017
First, bangs. In short, by inserting a website in the search bar anticipated by “!” it will give me back the page of that website with all the results for what I’m looking. For instance, I inserted in DuckDuckGo search box !tc ;DuckDuckGo where tc stands for tech crunch followed by < span=””>>DuckDuckGo. m<>>;In short, I’m saying to look for all the info about DuckDuckGo contained in Tech Crunch,
I will land on a page within the target website which is a sort of search or category page,
Another exciting feature is the instant answers. Since the beginning, Gabriel Weinberg focused his effort on providing answers to users’ questions. What today we know as a featured snippet on Google. Is DuckDuckGo instant answer more efficient than Google’s featured snippet?
Get Instant Answers
The future of search is more and more about answers. Also with the advent of voice search, people will be talking more often with their websites and looking for relevant answers. In short, the time in which search engines matched keywords is slowly going to end. Gabriel Weinberg understood back in 2008 that answers were supposed to be the primary purpose of a search engine. When humans look for something, pose questions (even though Google taught us to think of keywords).
The answers coming from DuckDuckGo are called instant answers and come from various sources (they say over 400 in total).
You type in a question, DuckDuckGo matches and trigger the answer,
Source: docs.duckduckhack.com
That is how you get the answer you were looking for!
Get a Social media bio
Let’s say you want to get more info about a social media account, like twitter trough the search engine. You can search for the twitter handle like I did below:
Here another example. That is DuckDuckGo founder and CEO, which I suggest you follow.
Shorten and expand links
When sharing a link, it would be nice to shorten it to make it more appealing. You can quickly do that with DuckDuckGo.
For instance, I typed “shorten fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-vs-google,”
I generated a short link. Let’s say I want to reverse the process. Therefore, I want to expand it again.
Type “expand https://is.gd/UGmtYi” and get the expanded link again.
Generate passwords
Generating passwords too is pretty simple. Have DuckDuckGo create a password for you. You can also decide the length of the password by typing for instance “Password 20″ so that DuckDuckGo will generate a 20 characters password automatically for you.
Use the right syntax
Like Google, DuckDuckGo has a language. Following DDG syntax is helpful to make your search more efficient and get the results you are looking for. For instance, see below the syntax for DuckDuckGo
Source: duck.co/help/results/syntax
Keyboard Shortcuts to become a pro
You can also become way faster by using a few shortcuts:>>
Source: duck.co/hel>>>;p/features/ke...
Y>ou can find the list of all shortcuts here. You can enable or disab>le keyboard shortcuts via the Settings page.
Make it yours by customising the appearance
One can customize the appearance of DDG as per your taste. You can find this in Settings > Theme or Settings > Appearance
This is how I customised my DDG fonts and style.
Get all the possible meanings
If you’re looking for all the possible meanings of something, search for it and then click on definitions. DuckD>uckGo will return all the possible meanings it finds through the web!
What’s the weather in your town?
Before going out, don’t take >risks. Ask DuckDuckGo how’s the weather outside!
Find cheat sheets to get 10x faster at anything
I love shortcuts because they make you become 10x quicker at anything. For example, when I was working as a financial analyst I used excel on a daily basis. When I learned how to use its shortcuts my productivity skyrocketed. I could get things done in less time and with better results!
Is a website Down?
Check if a website is down by asking it to DuckDuckGo:
Generate your QR code and share it!
I love QR codes. They are mysterious. For instance, imagine you convert an article in a QR code, as I did below:
You can then share that article and have people wonder what that is about! I find it another exciting way of sharing content.
#DuckDuckGo #QRCode pic.twitter.com/5keWppxGxW
— Gennaro Cuofano (@fourweekmba) October 9, 2017
Find the right HTML Code
If yn>ou’re not a programmer or developer DuckDuckGo is fantastic. It has a solution to any problem. Let’s say you can’t find the € sign code anywhere. Ask DDG!
Stopwatch
Another way to improve productivity is using your search engine as a stopwatch. Set an hour to focus on one task and let the stopwatch tell you when it’s time to switch task.
Putting it all together>
DuckDuckGo is an excellent search engine, which doesn’t track you. If that isn’t enough, it also has a plethora of built-in features that allow you to do many fantastic and useful things. From getting instant answers to accessing a website without being tracked and checking the weather in your town, DDG got it all.
If you haven’t done it yet, go on and duck it!
I’m crowdfunding my next book. Do you want to support it? Click on the cover below!
The post Fifteen Smart Ways to Be More Productive with DuckDuckGo appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
October 10, 2017
The Greatest Myth About Web Search Leaked Out
Every day over two billion queries go through Google. Those queries feed Google and make it more intelligent but also make it more profitable. Below the breakdown of Google‘s revenues and how much of them come from advertising:
Google 10K Report – in millions
2014
2015
2016
Total Revenues
66,001
74,989
90,272
Advertising Revenues
59,624
67,390
79,383
Ad / Rev %
90.34%
89.87%
87.94%
Almost 88% of Google‘s revenues come from advertising. That isn’t either bad or good. Many companies today rely on advertising as the main source for their businesses.
However, you may not be aware, yet by default when searching through Google you’re getting tracked, and personal information is getting shared with websites you land on, in a vicious cycle called search leakage.
That is what makes you a victim of advertising by companies that use retargeting to sell their products or services. Ok, what’s wrong with it? After all, if those companies are providing you with relevant products or services, you may need. However, often those advertisings are:
invasive: if a person has used your computer for a couple of minutes you will know their preference because a retargeting advertisement will pop up within the websites you’ll navigate
ineffective: you often get suggested to buy things you’ve already purchased
disruptive: if you need to focus on reading an article you end up distracted multiple times
That is why 615 million devices use Adblock, and 11% of the global internet population is blocking ads on the web (source: pagefair.com). That is why it becomes impossible for you to get anything done when surfing the web. In fact, each time you get distracted it may take up to 25 minutes to get back your focus (source: lifehacker.com).
For how much Google wants to make sure the user experience, therefore the quality of results is high it is undeniable that with almost eighty billion dollars pouring in each year, keeping those ads going is crucial for its business model. That is why attempts to suppress ads – like the AdNaueam case – are an obstacle to Google’s bottom line.
Yet if Google wants you to think that it needs your data to offer excellent results or to make money, this is a myth we’ve been induced to believe, about web search!
Why tracking users is not necessary
As Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo – a search engine that focuses on privacy and that does not follow you – tells us,
It is a myth that search engines need to track you to make money on Web search. When you type in a search, we can show an ad just based on that search term. For example, if you type in, “car,” we show a car ad. That doesn’t involve tracking because it is based on the keyword and not the person.
Source: economictimes
In other words, when you input a keyword in the search box, if that keyword is transactional (think of you searching “I need a car insurance”) then the search engine may offer you an ad as a result.
[image error]
This isn’t only simpler but also better. In fact, the search engine is giving me what I need here and now, without relying on my search history, which may be dated. Therefore, you got what’s useful and necessary, instead what’s irrelevant. Also, when a search engine is not tracking you, you’re avoiding the so-called search leakage.
Or the fact that a search engine passes your info toward other third parties, like governments and marketers.
Other search engines, like DuckDuckGo, instead do not track you to avoid search leakages. So that you only get what you need and are sure your data isn’t given to other third parties.
If you still haven’t done it, start splitting you searches among what has been your default search engine, to DuckDuckGo.
I’m crowdfunding my next book. Do you want to support it? Click on the cover below!
The post The Greatest Myth About Web Search Leaked Out appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
September 17, 2017
Wolfram Alpha: The Physicist Turned a Successful Entrepreneur
Among my passions, I love to check financial data about companies I like. Recently I was looking for a quick way to get reliable financial information for comparative analyses. At the same time, I was looking for shortcuts to perform that analysis.
I was researching for myself. I thought why waste so much time on scraping financial reports? While surfing the web, I was looking for a solution and a term popped to my eyes “computational engine.”
Wolfram Alpha! That search opened me a universe I wasn’t aware of. Yet that universe wasn’t only about a fantastic tool I learned to use in several ways. I found out the most amazing entrepreneurial story. That is how I jumped in and researched as much as I could about this topic! Why is this story so remarkable?
Imagine a kid that as many others, is struggling at arithmetic. Imagine that same kid at 12 years old building a physics dictionary and by the age of 14 drafting three books about particle physics. A few years later at 23, that kid, now a man gets awarded as a prodigious physicist. We could stop this story here, and it would be already one of the most incredible stories you’ll ever hear.
Yet this is only the beginning. In fact, what if I told you, that same person turned into a successful entrepreneur, which built several companies and a whole new science from scratch! (Let’s save some details for later)
That isn’t only the story of Wolfram Alpha, a tool that I learned to use and cherish. That is the story of one of the smartest people of our century, a shrewd entrepreneur, and polymath, which turned to influence and being influenced by people like Steve Jobs and Benoit Mandelbrot.
This is the story of Stephen Wolfram.
Writing this post for me has been a pleasure and torture. On the one hand, I jumped into Stephen Wolfram‘s videos, books, and articles. The more I found out, the more I wanted to know. It was an endless loop.
However, the unbounded intelligence of Stephen Wolfram is such that trying to circumscribe it in one post, it is like trying to close the universe in a box. Yet more than a post this is an e-book, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Before we get to the practical matters related to Wolfram Alpha, I deconstructed his life and ideas.
The Quest to Unfold Complexity: who is Stephen Wolfram?
Because, after all that’s what technology is all about: setting up systems to achieve human purposes
Stephen Wolfram in Computation and the Future of the Human Condition
Stephen Wolfram is the founder of Wolfram Alpha, a powerful computational engine (more about what a computational engine is later on). Yet the path that brought Stephen Wolfram to the launch of its latest creature looked more like a life-long quest.
Born in London in 1959. Stephen Wolfram showed incredible qualities since a young age. In fact, by age 15 he had drafted three physics books and his first scientific paper. By the age of 21, he had received an important fellowship, which launched him on a life-long quest: understanding complex systems by stripping out their complexity.
Yet Stephen Wolfram approach was unique for a couple of reasons, I believe.
First, he understood that computation was the most compelling discovery of the past century. Therefore, he focused since the beginning of using machines to enhance human abilities.
Second, he believed that to understand complexity he had to look at natural processes to find the most essential programs that mother nature used by time to time to run the show of life.
Yet Stephen Wolfram didn’t spend his life as a hermit (except when, for practical purposes, he had to put together a book, which would become a New Kind of Science) or isolated from the world. Instead, he understood the importance of more practical matters, such as managing people.
The quest to complexity started from the study of cellular automata, which launched him to formulating a computing theory of everything. So, what are cellular automata?
Computing a theory of everything
So I want to talk today about an idea. It’s a big idea. Actually, I think it’ll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that’s emerged in the past century. It’s the idea of computation. Now, of course, that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on. But there’s actually a lot more to computation than that. It’s really a very deep, very powerful, very fundamental idea, whose effects we’ve only just begun to see.
Cellular automata are programs that follow simple deterministic rules but show complex behaviors, the more steps they take along their evolution. What does that mean and what makes them so valuable from a scientific standpoint?
Imagine starting playing a game with fundamental and straightforward rules. Chances are you’ll start projecting yourself at the end of the game, foreseeing a particular scenario. However, as much as you would love to imagine, even if you had Albert Einstein‘s or Salvador Dali’s ability to day-dream you will never manage to foresee the complex behaviors that will arise along the way from those trivial programs.
How is that possible that from such simple programs spring up so much complexity of behavior? The answer lies in rule number 30! Let’s dive a bit into it to see how it works.
Rule Number 30: simplicity as the mother of all creations
The weather has a mind of its own” isn’t such a primitive thing to say: the fluid dynamics of the weather is just as sophisticated as something like a brain
Stephen Wolfram, on blogs.scientificamerican.com
It probably was the summer of 1985 – as recalled in Idea Makers – when Steve Wolfram stumbled upon something that would leave a mark on his life and guide him toward a life-long quest. What was that?
It all started from rule number 30. As someone that found computation as the most important discovery of the past century Stephen Wolfram didn’t waste time doing calculations. Rather he let computers run all the possible programs that could be found in nature, as simple cellular automata and look at what behaviors they would show.
That is what happened that summer in 1985. Cellular automata are self-replicating systems showed as a grid of changing cells. Each cell in the grid reacts based on the neighboring cells. In other words, you start from a grid like the one below
A simple rule determines whether a cell will be on or off in the next generation based on the configuration of its neighborhood. For instance, if a cell is white, and the one on its left and right are white, then the cell stays white. Instead, if a white cell falls in-between two black cells, then it turns black. And so on for all the possible arrangements.
The possible configurations on a grid comprised of three cells as you can see from the red rectangle above are eight. But the possible combinations, given the fact that each cell can be either black or white (in a binary state) can be 256 – 2 ^ 8 (therefore the two possible states, black or white, at the power of the eight possible combinations).
We start by letting the cellular automaton take 20 steps,
We can see already a more complex behavior so far. Yet nothing exciting.
When we start taking additional steps, the more steps we take, the more complexity arises.
That is what we get after 100 steps. As you can see the patterns created by a simple cellular automaton starts to become kind of interesting.
Source: blog.stephenwolfram.com
When in the 1980s Stephen Wolfram observed this kind of behavior he was shocked. That kind of shock that changes your life, the aha moment! In fact, the more steps he let rule 30 take, the more complexity arose out of simple deterministic rules!
The fact that simple rules could replicate nature is pretty counter-intuitive, yet quite effective.
Cone Snail, Photographer: Richard Ling Cellular Automata Rule 30
Source: artfail.com
The most powerful part is that to build such complexity you don’t need a super powerful computer, but only a three-digit number grid that follows super simple rules. Rule number 30 above all, was the beginning of a quest that would lead Stephen Wolfram to formulate a New Kind of Science.
It also opens up a new way of thinking, where intelligence isn’t solely a human thing, but it can be found anywhere in nature. Therefore, the complexity arising from our brain isn’t different from what happens in nature. Both are described well by computations. Before we dive more into what would become the principles of Stephen Wolfram‘s book, A New Kind of Science, let’s dive more into his life.
Before Wolfram Alpha
If you’ve been using the iPhone, chances are you’ve also been using Wolfram Alpha all along. In fact, you may not know it, but your built-in intelligent assistant, Siri, uses Wolfram Alpha‘s API to provide answers to any question.
Yet before we dive into the technical stuff, how did it all start? From studying Stephen Wolfram‘s life, I understood one fundamental concept, which before was a bit elusive for me. In short, technologies, ideas, and enterprises don’t come in isolation. More often than not they spring up from people’s lives context.
In other words, if you want to understand an idea or a technology better probably the best place to start isn’t how it works but how it originated in that person’s mind. Also before that, you may want to investigate what, who, where and when inspired those ideas, if you want to understand the why.
As trivial as it may sound, I ended up discovering quite a few interesting facts by using Stephen Wolfram‘s approach. The paradox is that his approach helped me to better understand him as a person, therefore as an entrepreneur and scientist.
It all started from a life-long friendship with an incredible man, which for better or for worse (according to your perspective) revolutionized our times, Steve Jobs.
NeXT, Mathematica and the batch of computers that built the Web
Source: Commons.Wikimedia.org
According to Stephen Wolfram, in his book Idea Makers, he first met Steve Jobs back in 1987. At that time Steve Jobs was focused on building what would become the first NeXT computer.
In fact, business magnate Ross Perot, founder of Electronic Data Systems, which was sold to General Electric in 1984 for $2.4 billion had enough liquidity to make risky investments. Therefore, in 1987 Perot invested $20 million, in Steve Jobs‘ startup, NeXT, which although valued about $125 million hadn’t yet released any product.
In 1996 Apple bought NeXT for $429 million. After that, when Steve Jobs, in July 1997 took back the reins of Apple, NeXT experience played a vital role. In fact, Steve Jobs installed his NeXT executive team at Apple.
Goin back to our story, at the time (1987) Stephen Wolfram was as busy in figuring out the details of what would later become his first company, Mathematica. It turns out that in a way or another Steve Jobs played a key role in Stephen Wolfram’s company success and vice-versa.
Why is it called Mathematica?
Stephen Wolfram was undecided about how to call the company he was about to launch. Among the names he had in mind – as he reported in Idea Makers – there was either Omega or PolyMath. Yet one day by talking to Steve Jobs, he told him “you should call it Mathematica.”
According to Stephen Wolfram, Jobs had a theory about company’s names. In short, you start with a very generic concept, and then you romanticize it. That is where Mathematica came from.
What is Mathematica?
Mathematica is a software that does scientific computations of any kind. From data analysis to visualizations and much more, Mathematica laid the foundations for what would later become Wolfram Alpha.
One interesting fact is that Mathematica walked hand in hand with NeXT. In fact, Steve Jobs intuition made him realize that each NeXT should have been bundled with Mathematica and that is what happened.
The most interesting part of the story – as explained by Stephen Wolfram in Idea Makers – is that a batch of NeXT computers would later be given to the CERN of Geneva. In other words, NeXT computers bundled with Mathematica happened to be the computers used to develop the web!
Yet between Mathematica and the launch of Wolfram Alpha, Stephen Wolfram put together the ideas he had observed throughout his scientific discoveries, in a controversial book, A New Kind of Science.
A New Kind of Science
Stephen Wolfram‘s A New Kind of Science is a remarkable book in many ways. It is certainly the most arrogant piece of science writing I have ever read. It also displays a jaw-dropping ignorance of some key issues, of which more later. Yet, despite its shortcomings, it may be the most important contribution to science this decade.
by Chris Lavers on theguardian.com
In 2002, Stephen Wolfram‘s book A New Kind of Science was out, and it was quite controversial. That is also clear if you look at its Amazon reviews,
One thing I understood by looking at Stephen Wolfram‘s personality is either you love him, or you hate him. More precisely either you think he’s a genius or you think he’s mad. In fact, it is also funny to see how polarised are the feedbacks about his book,
The book has as much 1 star reviews, then 5-star ones. You may think that those one-star reviews are from people that were not erudite enough to comprehend it, and vice-versa the five-star came from the scientific community. That is not the case,
Throughout my research, I’ve come to “know” Stephen Wolfram at a personal level (take it with a pinch of salt). Since the beginning, I tried to keep a neutral view about him. Yet I found his ideas original and refreshing in many ways.
Of course, it can be argued that his ego is massive. However, if you look at his life, you realize that he’s one of the greatest minds of our times. It is very hard to understand how a person is contributing to our history until that person is no longer alive. We love to look at things with a nostalgic eye. That is why things from the past always have this halo that makes them look almost mystic and mysterious.
That is why when you see Stephen Wolfram comparing himself to Isaac Newtown you get the goosebumps. Only time will tell us what impact Stephen Wolfram‘s ideas will have.
Going back to A New Kind of Science, one of the people who contributed to Stephen Wolfram‘s growth was physicist Richard Feynman. Although they had two very different mindsets, they shared a common passion, physics.
They met when Stephen Wolfram was 18, while Richard Feynman was 60. Stephen Wolfram first met Richard Feynman at Caltech. After that they also worked together for a company called Thinking Machines Corporation (once a successful tech company then bankrupted in 1994).
Richard Feynman loved to do calculations for the sake of feeling the pleasure of discovery. Stephen Wolfram instead, loved to automate processes for the sake of understanding the principles underlying, so that unknown would eventually become more relatable.
I leave the judgment on whether a New Kind of Science’s ideas are worth or not your attention to Richard Feynman. In fact, when Stephen Wolfram stumbled upon rule 30 Richard Feynman told him,
OK, Wolfram, I can’t crack it. I think you’re on to something. (source: Idea Makers)
Let’s dive into a couple of core principles from Stephen Wolfram‘s book.
The principle of computational equivalence
As Stephen Wolfram reminds us nature has no constraints when it comes to computation. In other words, mother nature can pick up whatever “little computational program” exist out there to start building complex stuff.
However, that complexity always springs from a low level of sophistication, which is equal for all the “programs” that you can ever find in nature. In other words, it doesn’t matter how complicated the outcome or a process it seems. What’s behind it are always relatively simple deterministic rules!
Why is this principle staggering in a way? If you didn’t realize, this principle contradicts something which humans always believed to be true. The fact that something complex is at its root complex. Also that in some way our intelligence us unique or in some way distinct from any other natural process.
Yet what Stephen Wolfram shows us is the opposite. Nature works through computational equivalence. Instead, human processes evolve through the purposes that by time to time become relevant. At times what becomes relevant by human standard may well be “an accident.”
For instance, as Stephen Wolfram recollects, if you take mathematics, that is based on a few axioms. But are those the only possible axioms? Of course, they are not. There are infinitely many other ones. Instead, the mathematics we have today is only “an historical accident.”
Therefore, many technological inventions often carry the heavy baggage of history.
That also brings us toward another pillar of the New Kind of Science: computational irreducibility.
Computational Irreducibility: how does our universe work according to Stephen Wolfram?
If complexity in nature arises from simple deterministic rules, does that mean that if we figure out those simple rules, we will also be able to predict the outcome of the system?
The answer to that is controversial. According to Stephen Wolfram‘s computational irreducibility, we won’t be able to out-compute a system unless we take each step of it. In short, it doesn’t matter if you’re able to understand the underlying deterministic rules that are behind a complex system.
If you don’t follow how the system evolves at each stage, you won’t be able to know what the output of that system will be. Therefore, you will not be able to predict its behavior. In part, this is reassuring as it gives us back our free will. Why? For most cases, we don’t have a choice but wait and see how the behavior unfolds.
However, this isn’t always true. As Stephen Wolfram suggests for certain processes, there are always endless of what he calls “pockets of reducibility” which allow at least some kind of predictions.
Now that we covered most of Stephen Wolfram‘s life, and how his mains ideas formed, we can look more at the entrepreneurial side of the story.
The launch of Wolfram Alpha
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On May 18, 2009, finally, Wolfram Alpha launch was announced. At the eye of the average onlooker that seemed the start of something entirely new. Yet instead, it was only the next stage in the evolution of Stephen Wolfram‘s research he had put together throughout his whole life.
In fact, Wolfram Alpha was launched as a spin-off of Wolfram Research, Inc., the company that developed Mathematica back in 1986.
As an LLC Wolfram Alpha was launched without outside investments.
How does Wolfram Alpha work?
When you surf the web, you use search engines. For instance, each time you ask something to Google, it is providing you answers based on what it finds by crawling, indexing and ranking the web pages available.
Eventually, you will get links to pages that exist on the web. Those pages though are manufactured by other humans. Wolfram Alpha instead, computes answers to specific questions using its knowledge base and algorithms.
You may think that Wolfram Alpha is more like a fact-based engine. And in fact, compared to Wikipedia, it gives facts not narratives.
In short, Wolfram Alpha goes into its internal knowledge base, made of several official sources and curated data and computes the answers, based on which ones seemed to be the most appropriate for the query.
The answer to a query comes from an algorithmic computation that looks into the internal knowledge base, with its extensive internal semantics and ontology.
To read the users’ queries, Wolfram Alpha does not use traditional NLP because it has to deal with linguistic fragments rather than full grammatical sentences.
The technologies behind Wolfram Alpha can be divided into four key general areas:
a data curation pipeline
an algorithmic computation system
a linguistic processing system
an automated presentation system.
Currently Wolfram Alpha comprises more than 10 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code, together with many terabytes of data. When you type your queries into Wolfram Alpha, you’re making it better and better. In fact, it looks at the user behavior to understand more about linguistic and compute better answers.
Source: WolframAlpha.com
How does Wolfram Alpha make money?
Wolfram Alpha makes money in a few ways:
iPhone/iPad Apps
Each App ranges from $0.99 up to $2.99 (even though I can see that on the European App Sore some apps are priced around €3.49, about $4.16).
How much money are they making with that? It is very hard to give this answer considering that I couldn’t find any announcement from the company stating how much money they are making.
I used Similar Web to understand how many installs the main app had.
Assuming that each install is a paying customer they made on that single app anywhere from $1.5 up to $3 million for a single app. My assumption (take this premise like a pinch of salt) is that overall the other apps may have paid off about the same. Therefore, if I have to give a rough estimate, I would say they made anywhere from $1 million up to $5 million on all the apps they sold so far.
API: those are a set of prepackaged instructions to integrate an application within another platform. For instance, as we saw throughout this research, the iPhone and other Apple devices use Wolfram Alpha API to make their built-in intelligent assistant, Siri, provide the answers to its users.
API usually have a cost based on the volume of calls you make through queries. Therefore, the more queries go through Wolfram Alpha, the more it will cost regarding API. Based on what they have on the website this is the price of Wolfram Alpha‘s API for a thousand queries,
I believe this is where most of the company’s revenues come from. In fact, if I had a business that has to offer a certain amount of computational power to my users I would use Wolfram Alpha rather than going through the process of developing a new stack of technologies.
Now, the hardest question. How much money does Wolfram Alpha make with its API?
I assume that Apple is Wolfram Alpha largest client. If back in 2012, Siri’s queries drove 25% of Wolfram Alpha, if this still holds true we can run some rough estimates.
If there are 3.3 million hits per day, if we assume a hit is a query, then there are about 825,000 queries coming from Siri, which translates into about 825 API calls by a thousand queries per day. If we assume that Siri calls are “Full Results API” this means that they are priced $50 per thousand calls, which would cost over $15 million annually.
Hits per day
3,300,000
25% coming from Siri
825,000
Divided by 1,000
825
Cost of API per day
$41,250
Total API cost
$15,056,250
I don’t think Apple is paying Wolfram Alpha that much for several reasons. First, being featured in Siri is already free marketing for Wolfram Alpha. Second, the more API calls you buy, the better deal you will get. Therefore, I believe if ever Apple does pay Wolfram Alpha, the price it pays is well below the $50 mark per a thousand.
However, I do believe that the API is the most important part of Wolfram Alpha business.
Also, apparently Siri isn’t the only intelligent assistant powered by Wolfram Alpha. In fact, Cortana may be using it too.
Pro Version: you can get the PRO version of Wolfram Alpha (ranging from $5.49 up to $9.99 per month) which includes enhanced features,
It’s impossible to determine the exact number of PRO users since they don’t share that info. However, since Wolfram Alpha is a Freemium, we can assume that their rate of conversion may be anywhere from 0.5% up to 27%.
Source: process.st
Let’s assume the lowest conversion rate, 0.5%, which means that Wolfram Alpha (I don’t see any strategy which is focused on improving its conversion rates) might have about ten thousand paying customers each year (0,5% times 1.9 million daily visitors, assuming they are returning). It means about $77,400 in revenue each year (I took the average of the two packages, student for $5.49 and educator for $9.99, and multiplied it by 10,000, the number of paying customers each year.
Now the hardest question,
Is Wolfram Alpha profitable?
I’m not going to do crazy calculations to figure this out. Since for a software company the greatest cost is related to its personnel, according to CrunchBase, Wolfram Alpha has about 19 employees, including Stephen Wolfram as a founder.
I also looked at the whole Wolfram Research profile on Glassdoor,
I wanted to have a rough idea about the average salary paid by the company,
I will never stop saying, my analysis is full of assumptions and estimates based on those. Therefore, take it as an attempt to put a $ on a company that I didn’t know anything about before. Nothing more!
Since in Wolfram Alpha, most profiles are senior, thus above the average I will estimate the average salary to be 30% above of a Software Engineer. In short, it will be around $80k per year. Taking this into account the total annual estimated costs are $1.6 million (I assume that Stephen Wolfram gets paid like any other employee at least at Wolfram Alpha).
If we take the total estimated revenues by accounting only for the API paid by Apple, $15 million per year and the total estimated costs of its employees, $1.6 million, then the company is profitable!
Wolfram Alpha vs. Google
It has often been said that Wolfram Alpha is challenging Google. For how I love this perspective, those companies have two opposite approach to business. As we saw, Wolfram Alpha makes money by selling its premium version, its API, and its apps.
Google makes most of its revenues through advertising. For instance, in 2016 Google made more than 90 billion in revenue and almost 88% ($79 billion) came from advertising. In other words, comparing Wolfram Alpha to Google is like comparing apples to oranges. However, if we look at raw data, Google wins many times over,
[image error]Also if we look at the rankings, Wolfram Alpha is tiny,
In short, Wolfram Alpha is a niche engine compared to Google. Will it go mainstream? I believe it will, and it already did. But most people don’t and won’t know that. As we saw Siri uses Wolfram Alpha API, yet only a small percentage of iPhone users know that.
What can you do with Wolfram Alpha?
There is a multitude of ways you can use Wolfram Alpha, once you understand its basics.
Math, physics, and statistics are useful for researchers. Yet there are quite a few practical things you can do either if you work in the financial field but also as a digital marketer.
Get Financial Data and Perform Financial Analyses Quickly
For instance, by inputting a simple query, you can get financial data and a complete financial comparison,
Check a website statistics
By inserting a website URL into Wolfram Alpha, you can get its main metrics,
With the same logic, you can compare sites’ metrics,
There are also a bunch of other things you can do. I dive into them more in detail below,
How to Use Wolfram Alpha for Finance Professionals to Boost Your Career
How to Use Wolfram Alpha as Personal Fitness Assistant to Improve Your Health
Add Wolfram Alpha Widget to your website
If you want to make your website more appealing to your visitors, you may want to embed a Wolfram Alpha widget to your site,
You can customise it a bit. That is the way it will look like,
Now that we saw quite a few things you can do with Wolfram Alpha let’s investigate a bit more.
Can you optimise for Wolfram Alpha?
You can optimise your queries to get the best possible results. For instance, if you go into the Examples by Topics section, you will find some use cases on how to submit queries to Wolfram Alpha,
I checked the statistics and data analysis section, and that is what I got,
What about your content? Can the content on your website be optimised for Wolfram Alpha? The answer I believe is not! Wolfram Alpha is a computation engine. That means that also when a source, like Wikipedia, is taken into account, it is stripped of its narrative to show what can be considered as facts.
In other words, as we saw Wolfram Alpha doesn’t crawl the web as Google does. But it has an internal knowledge base, which is updated and curated by time to time. Also, let’s say that Wolfram Alpha can compute an answer from a piece of extract coming from a web page of your site. Even though it does so, this will not translate in traffic or domain authority back to your site. Why? Because Wolfram Alpha does not provide links or backlinks, the foundation for other search engines.
Summary and Conclusions
Throughout this story, we saw the life of one of the most interesting people of our times. Since a young age, he showed keen interest and talent for physics. Yet instead of pursuing only its interests in physics and philosophy Stephen Wolfram became a successful entrepreneur.
He managed to build from scratch Mathematica, a company bundled with NeXT. Also, he managed to take time to reflect and understand the consequences of his earlier studies on cellular automata to create a framework, which would become a New Kind of Science. If that was not enough, Stephen Wolfram realized it was time to democratize math and bring it to the masses.
That is what he did when he launched Wolfram Alpha, which as we saw is an incredible tool that can be used in a variety of ways. It is almost like having Einstein in your pocket. With the main difference that Wolfram Alpha never sleeps.
Not only Wolfram Alpha is a great tool but also a profitable company (if my assumptions are correct).
You may like or dislike Stephen Wolfram‘s personality. One thing is sure; he’s making a difference in many fields. At the end of it all if he’s right on computational irreducibility there’s only one way to know how much Stephen Wolfram has contributed to humankind, time!
Suggested Readings
Quotes I love from Stephen Wolfram
brains are no more computationally sophisticated than lots of systems in nature, and even than systems with very simple rules
What is inevitable about future machines is that they’ll operate in ways we can’t immediately foresee. In fact, that happens all the time already; it’s what bugs in programs are all about.
The main thing we humans do that can’t meaningfully be automated is to decide what we ultimately want to do.
Human goals will certainly evolve, and the things people will think are the best possible things to do in the future may well be things we don’t even have words for yet.
Source: blogs.scientificamerican.com
The post Wolfram Alpha: The Physicist Turned a Successful Entrepreneur appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
September 10, 2017
DuckDuckGo: The Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game
It all started when one day I was checking the referral traffic of my blog. This is something I do often to see what are the channels beyond Google that are bringing qualified traffic to my website. Yet that day it was different. Down the list, I saw something I’ve never seen before,
[image error]
A website called duckduckgo.com brought me some traffic. The first question that popped to mind was “what the heck is duckduckgo.com?”
Initially, I thought it was a spammy website, which was bringing undesired traffic to my site. However, by investigating into the issue, I found out a compelling story that it is worth knowing for anyone interested in Startups, Entrepreneurship, Solopreneurship, SEO, Growth Hacking and much more.
In fact, the story of DuckDuckGo is inspiring from several perspectives. That is why I decided to cover it in its utmost details. More than a post this is an e-book. Yet if you don’t have the time now to read this post, you can download the ebook when a form will pop-up, otherwise, read on!
What is DuckDuckGo?
DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine, which focuses on privacy. Although I will call it a search engine DuckDuckGo is more of a hybrid engine. In short, it uses proprietary crawlers on the one hand. And APIs from other websites on the other hand. The mission is clear, DuckDuckGo doesn’t store your personal information. Therefore, your personal details won’t be shared either. In short, they address a felt issue, which is privacy.
However this was not DuckDuckGo primary mission at the beginning but an adjustment made along the way, which made it get traction (we’ll see that down the road). As a general purpose engine DuckDuckGo mission is to provide instant answers to as many questions a user has. Before we dive into technical matters, let’s answer a question that I had as soon as I started to find out more: How did it all start?
DuckDuckGo at the time of this writing
DuckDuckGo is far from being a top player in the search engine industry. In fact, just to give you some raw data, the major player in the sector is still Google. If I had to use a metaphor, Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo).
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You can see Alexa’s ranking for DuckDuckGo.com. Not bad after all. Yet let’s look at Google,
[image error]
Google is number one.
We often tend to forget that search engines are de facto websites. Their main purpose is to make us find other websites, pages or in any case anything we’re looking for!
I looked at DuckDuckGo vs. Google also by using a computational engine, Wolfram Alpha. Here too the results are quite staggering,
I don’t like commenting numbers (we have bots for that) but I want to give you a visual hook that can be helpful to you in order to understand how small is DuckDuckGo in comparison to Google,
Although using a pie chart, in this case, is not the best possible way to look at this data (I assumed users that use DuckDuckGo don’t use Google and vice-versa) this is just to give you a visual understanding of where DuckDuckGo stands so far.
Things don’t look better if we look at this comparison from other perspectives. For instance, If I search for DuckDuckGo on Google I get roughly 3.5 million results,
[image error]
If I do the same with Google, you get over 11 billion results!
[image error]
That is from the offering side. In other words, here we’re looking at how many pages of content produced we have for each. Yet if we look from the side of the demand, things don’t look better either,
[image error]
The comparison does not hold. People searching for DuckDuckGo are a dismal number compared to people searching for Google.
As we know history is written by the victors and so far Google is shaping the future of the web, therefore, of humankind. Yet if there’s one thing that history teaches us and that technology reinforced is that often what seems unexpected happen. Thus, a question that popped into my mind as soon as I started to dive into the DuckDuckGo story was “what if instead of Google, DuckDuckGo conquered the web? How would have the net looked like?”
My romantic side tries to make me believe that another web was possible. That we weren’t supposed to have the internet where ads took over, fake news spread at the speed of light and social media went mainstream!
On the other hand, my rational side kicks in with a few interesting points. First, who said we were supposed to have the web after all? So why don’t look with amazement what we managed to build? And even if social media was a creation of the web so it was blogging. If blogging didn’t exist I wouldn’t be here telling you my side of the story. So after all things don’t look as bad as my romantic side wants me to believe. That is why I’m going to treat this story as it is, trying to be as neutral as possible.
In short, let’s begin by saying this is a story of a company that is trying to build a different web. A story of a businessman that mastered the art of traction. The story of a shrewd solopreneur that challenged the status quo. If ancient people got inspired by the accounts of mythological characters, like Ulysses or Aeneas. We moderns like to hear the lives of people like Ford, Buffett, and Jobs. We like to listen to their courage and willingness to take risks. Yet Gabriel Weinberg’s story is more than that. It is the account of a 27 years old man, sitting in his room, alone. Figuring out what to do next. A man freed from financial needs left with boredom, the mother of all inventions!
Before DuckDuckGo: Who is Gabriel Weinberg?
Born in 1979, Gabriel Weinberg studied at the MIT. As soon as out from MIT (it was in 2000) he started an educational software company called Learnection. The aim was to make parents more involved in their kids’ school life. In other words, a proto-social network. As Gabriel Weinberg himself reports in an interview with Forbes,
I finished school in three years. But I was lucky and my grandmother had left me tuition money for four years of college. I used that and I raised some friends and family money. I lost all of it, between $30,000 and $45,000.
The beginnings as an entrepreneur weren’t very bright. Asked what caused that failure, Gabriel Weinberg stressed he did many things wrong, comprised hiring his friends, which turned out not to be the best choice.
What did he do next? From Forbes interview he replied,
I started another four to six companies of various kinds. One was a success. It was an early social networking company. The product was called NamesDatabase. It was a way to find old classmates and friends. It’s a completely anachronistic concept now, given Facebook, but this was between 2003 and 2006. I sold it to classmates.com in 2006 for $10 million.
According to Gabriel Weinberg what made NamesDatabase – the company that would set the stage for DuckDuckGo – successful, was the focus on getting users before he even had a product! He likes to call it traction. In short, to make an enterprise successful you have to split half of your time on product and the other half on getting customers. From the combination of business and product development, there’s traction.
Although NamesDatabase was a successful enterprise there was something missing. Gabriel Weinberg as he admitted was not a social networker. In short, he was short of passion for what he was doing. Therefore, the next question that came naturally to him was “what can I do that would keep me passionate for at least ten years?” In fact, that is the minimum amount of time Gabriel Weinberg believes an enterprise will take to be successful and gain the right amount of traction to scale up. The answer to this question came shortly.
The Solopreneur’s Way
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Source: angel.co
Gabriel Weinberg was sitting alone in his new home in Philadelphia, doing nothing for the first time in his life. In March 2006 he had sold a company he had co-founded, called Opobox (dba The Names Database.) It was a social networking service sold for $10 million dollars to Classmates.com.
At the time of the successful exit, Gabriel and his wife were moving from an 865-square-foot apartment near Boston to a country house outside Philadelphia. At that time still 27 years old, Gabriel Weinberg was too young to retire. Alone, with nothing to do and no one he knew for hundreds of miles of radius from his house he started to tinker.
What to do next with all that money? He had nothing to lose so he started a bunch of side-projects. From crawling Wikipedia to finding answers to any question; to identifying spam and classification analyses to community building.
As Gabriel Weinberg also recalls in the preface of his book, Traction and a series of interviews for FounderFilms he reached the point where he would undertake dozens of side-projects simultaneously. His objective was quite simple: identify the projects he didn’t like, while keep going with the ones he felt passionate about. That is how he ended up starting thousands of side-projects. The side projects that he found most interesting were those that revolved on search.
His point of view on search was peculiar. In fact, in the era in which AI was at its embryonic stage, Gabriel Weinberg took an unusual view. He always believed that the most interesting information was in people’s heads. Algorithms’ job was to identify that information and give the answer that other humans were looking for.
What today Google calls featured snippet, as an attempt to find users’ questions, DuckDuckGo called them instant answers since day one. In other words, one of the primary mission from which DuckDuckGo started was the attempt to answer as many questions as possible. Rather than having an algorithm manufacture the answer, the search engine would be the intermediary bridging the gap from people’s minds to share what they knew.
Two other things are peculiar I believe in this story. First, DuckDuckGo didn’t start as a nerd attempt to find the ultimate algorithm. Instead, he just wanted to make search less spammy, more focused on privacy and able to find more instant answers. Second, even though Gabriel Weinberg was not a lover of social networks (though he became financially free through the sale of a social network) he understood the value of communities. In fact, an online community called Hacker News will be the first to see DuckDuckGo in action and help it gain some traction.
Time for some more tinkering: what did Gabriel Weinberg do after selling his first successful startup?
After all that tinkering Gabriel Weinberg had noticed two things.
First, Google was often giving back sites with a bunch of spammy ads. Let’s not forget that Google is an advertising company, and most of its revenues are coming from advertising.
Before we continue with the story I want to give you a quick outlook about Google‘s business model. I checked Google’s 10K for 2016. This is the annual report companies have to submit to the SEC.
Google 10K Report – in millions
2014
2015
2016
Total Revenues
66,001
74,989
90,272
Advertising Revenues
59,624
67,390
79,383
Ad / Rev %
90.34%
89.87%
87.94%
As you can see in 2016, 79 billion of dollars of Google‘s earnings come from advertising. It represents almost 88% of the total revenues. Even though the revenues coming from ads in 2014 were higher (over 90%), Google is definitely an advertising company and nothing makes us believe things will change in the next future. Why am I telling you this? As a company that makes most of its money from advertising Google might be biased toward maximising the profits coming from ads independently from users’ interests.
What about DuckDuckGo Business Model? How does DuckDuckGo make money? We’ll see it more in detail later on.
Second, when looking for something, Google did not provide answers. Which made Gabriel Weinberg go on the main sites like Wikipedia and IMDb to look for answers. Those two things alone made him realize there was still space to create a search engine able to provide what he would later call instant answers based on the information provided by communities around the web. That is how a year and a half later he realized he was on to something. That something was about to become a search engine with a duck as a logo.
Flipping the switch: The Solo-launch
One day when Gabriel Weinberg was walking with his wife had a name popping in his head. Almost like those things that get incepted into your mind Gabriel Weinberg could hear “DuckDuckGo.”That is how he decided that whatever would his next company be he would have called it DuckDuckGo!
Then the year 2008 arrived. He had put together the pieces of the puzzle to create a viable version of the search engine he had in mind. Ready to launch Gabriel Weinberg started to talk about the project he was about to launch. Rather than getting excited, most people that heard him talk about that project found him crazy.
How could a young man in his 30s compete against a giant like Google? At the time Google was already worth about a hundred billion dollars. Why would anyone switch to other search engines when Google was proving quite reliable. Not only its algorithms gave to users what they were looking for (or least what they thought they were looking for) but there was also the rise of an entire industry based on the fight between Google and online marketers trying to figure out how Google’s algorithms worked: the SEO industry. Would a new search engine bring the attention of that industry? It probably wouldn’t and in fact, it didn’t.
Gabriel Weinberg solo-launched on September 25th, 2008. On the international newspapers, there wasn’t a trace of DuckDuckGo‘s launch. That didn’t happen because it was not what Gabriel Weinberg was looking for. He just wanted to know whether he was on the right track to building the kind of search engine he had in mind.
That is how that day he launched DuckDuckGo on a forum called Hacker News,
[image error]
Feedbacks arrived quite soon,
Source: News.Ycombinator
From the “horrible name” to people blown away by how effective DuckDuckGo was for a solo-development and launch; after all Gabriel Weinberg understood he was into something. It was time to start focusing on getting traction!
Challenge the Status Quo: How do you make people switch to your service when you’re the last to enter the market?
Like any company that is starting out in a market dominated by others, the greatest challenge is to make the user switch to your product or service. The same problem applied to DuckDuckGo. Why would anyone switch to a search engine with a weird name when you’re already happy with Google‘s answers? Plus why would you change to an unknown site when you can browse the web through the most popular site in the world?
[image error]
Finding the answer to those questions meant success or failure for DuckDuckGo. It was time to find a hook, something that would get people’s attention for long enough to have them switch to this new search engine.
The 19 Channels of Growth: how did DuckDuckGo start to get traction?
The growth of DuckDuckGo didn’t happen in a day but it took more than six years. After launching on September 2008 Gabriel Weinberg spent the next two years refining DuckDuckGo. As he admitted in his Forbes’ interview in 2016,
I launched DuckDuckGo at the end of 2008, and in March of 2009 my first son was born and I decided to stay at home with him for at least the first two years. Through those two years I just kept at it and tinkering with it. At the end of 2010 all the iterative work on the project became better. Something clicked and people started to switch to it. Then in 2011 I started to treat it as more of a real thing, and at the end of 2011 I went and raised $3 million from Union Square Ventures.
After raising the money it was time to think business. As we saw, from his previous ventures, Gabriel Weinberg had learned that if he wanted to launch a successful enterprise he had to take care of the distribution side. He also figured that for a startup the growth process isn’t too linear.
In short, for each growth stage, there are channels that work and channels that don’t. Often to hack the growth of your startup at a certain stage you have to try several channels. At the same time when reached a threshold of growth, some channels stop to work and you have to experiment with new ones. Those ideas matured in his book, Traction.
In the book, Gabriel Weinberg identified 19 channels for growth:
Targeting Blogs
Publicity
Unconventional PR
Search Engine Marketing
Social and Display Ads
Offline Ads
Search Engine Optimization
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Viral Marketing
Engineering as Marketing
Business Development
Sales
Affiliate Programs
Existing Platforms
Trade Shows
Offline Events
Speaking Engagements
Community Building
Source: Medium
Yet each of those channels has to be tested. How do you determine whether a channel is suited fro growth? Gabriel Weinberg’s answer relied on the Bullseye Framework!
What is the Bullseye Framework?
The bullseye framework follows three simple steps, with the aim of hitting one target: traction!
The first layer is about what’s possible. In other words, this is a brainstorming phase in which the team starts to gather at least a strategy per channel that may be used to start “moving the needle of growth.”
The second layer is about what’s probable. In short, this is the phase where you start experimenting and testing the strategies that were brainstormed in the first step. Here it is crucial to start with cheap tests. That is not the phase where you have to go all in. Look at it as a tasting phase. Where you start tasting the market to see what works and what does not.
The inner ring is the bullseye. That is where you identified the channel or channels that are fueling the growth. Therefore, focusing on them at least until they will bootstrap your startup to the next growth phase. Eventually, you’ll restart the process to identify which channel or channels will work for the next growth stage (to dive more into it go to Medium).
DuckDuckGo Growth, Explained
DuckDuckGo grew steadily until 2013 when its growth compounded. Part of the growth was due to the channels Gabriel Weinberg identified. One channel was well-suited to fuel its growth and it was in part unexpected: virality.
The growth of DuckDuckGo consisted mainly of four stages so far (I consider Safari and Firefox in the same growth stage). Let’s see how they evolved throughout the years,
[image error]
Source: duckduckgo.com
Stage One, the Billboard
Source: Wired
It was 2011 when Gabriel Weinberg started to experiment off-line advertising with a billboard, which said “Google tracks you. We don’t.”
According to Wired, that campaign cost was $7,000 for four weeks, and it started “in tech-heavy SOMA district, along the highway dumping cars off the Bay Bridge into San Francisco.”
It was not the first channel Gabriel Weinberg had experimented. In fact, previous to that DuckDuckGo had reached already over 160,000 queries a day (according to Wired) through two main channels: Hacker News (we saw that when DuckDuckGo got launched) and Stumbleupon. Not bad after all for a solo-launch! (although in 2011 DuckDuckGo was more structured). Time to hack the second growth stage.
Stage Two, Google privacy policy change
In 2012 Google updated its privacy policy to integrate all the data across Gmail, YouTube and other 57 Google services. Although it was a great move for Google to start bringing its services to the next level (this integration allowed Google to offer more “cool things” to its users) it also started to raise the first concerns toward privacy. In fact, users could not opt-out from that policy. That is also what unexpectedly brought to the third stage of growth.
Stage Three, surveillance revelations
In 2013, Edward Snowden computer analyst for CIA leaked classified information which revealed several global surveillance programs run by the NSA and the other agencies. That is how the privacy concerns arose in the public opinion. That is also how DuckDuckGo finally understood its hook to make users switch from other search engines.
At that point, privacy became the primary mission of the company (together with finding instant answers), and the element that made the growth get traction. In fact, as Gabriel Weinberg has affirmed all along you don’t need to track people to make money with advertising.
How do you make money if you don’t track users?
All you need is a keyword. For instance, let’s say I’m looking for a new computer, I insert the keyword in the search box “new PC” and all you have to show me are ads related to that. I don’t necessarily have to see all the things I’ve been looking for in the past.
That is why I often find suggestions to buy things I already have. In addition, my computer might have been used by someone else, which makes my navigation history worthless for what I need. In short, ads may be more effective when tied to a search term rather than your navigation history.
[image error]
Once the Snowden case spread globally, Gabriel Weinberg understood he had to go all in with privacy concerns!
Finding the Hook: privacy as mission statement
Initially, the primary purpose of the company was not primarily privacy. In fact, when they launched they were focusing mainly on getting rid of spam and find as many instant answers as possible.
Yet after launching Gabriel Weinberg was asked by media about privacy, which he hadn’t thought about. So he went searching for it and he found out a few things that made him think through.
First, that data is the most personal because you don’t think about what you’re searching. In other words, when you’re looking to solve a problem all you have in mind is your goal. You are not concerned about your privacy. Therefore, you’re giving away – without realizing – the most sensible and private information. That information is getting tracked and stored.
Second, that data that gets tracked and stored is eventually distributed to governments and marketers.
Third, a search can work also without tracking personal data. Those things made DuckDuckGo change path and start focusing its mission on privacy. It was early 2007. Ever since privacy became one of the major focus and concern of the company. That is why and how in 2013 when the Snowden case exploded DuckDuckGo found itself perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the scandal. That is a positive black swan!
Stage Four, Safari and Firefox
In 2015 DuckDuckGo finally landed in Safari and Firefox built-in search option. Beyond the importance it had for the growth of DuckDuckGo, it was also a crucial step as the hybrid engine got finally accepted among the big players in the industry (Google, Yahoo, and Bing).
Note: Even though I divided the growth of DuckDuckGo into four stages; in reality, ever since its launch it never stopped growing. In 2012 Gabriel Weinberg affirmed that DuckDuckGo was already growing at a 500% rate on a yearly basis.
One question arises at this point,
Inside DuckDuckGo: How does DuckDuckGo make money?
DuckDuckGo makes money in two simple ways:
Advertising: show an ad based on the keyword you typed into the search box
Affiliate revenue: through Amazon and eBay affiliate programs. When a user buys after getting there through DuckDuckGo the company gets a small commission
The advertising side is pretty simple. As we saw it is a myth that you have to track users to advertise. In fact, one a person enters a keyword into the search box, if that keyword could be related to a product then the search engine may return an ad within the results. For instance, if I’m searching for “car insurance” then the search engine will return an ad related to that. As simple as that!
Is DuckDuckGo profitable? According to what Garbeil Weinberg said in 2015, the company was already profitable, and its revenues exceeded $1 million. Compared to Google‘s 74.9 billion! In short, DuckDuckGo revenues make up 0.001% of Google‘s revenue.
Ok, not so exciting from the financial standpoint. Let’s dive into the way DuckDuckGo works and what makes it unique!
Search Leakage: How does DuckDuckGo work?
As explained on DuckDuckGo.com
At other search engines, when you do a search and then click on a link, your search terms are sent to that site you clicked on (in the HTTP referrer header). We call this sharing of personal information “search leakage.”
The thing is you’re not only sharing that personal information with search engines but also with the websites where you land on. Apparently, that information may also be used to track you.
What about DuckDukcGo?
DuckDuckGo prevents search leakage by default. Instead, when you click on a link on our site, we route (redirect) that request in such a way so that it does not send your search terms to other sites. The other sites will still know that you visited them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand.
The same applies to search history and all the related information that can be found from the data that gets stored. To see it more in detail go to DuckDuckGo.
Ok fine, DuckDuckGo has a better privacy policy compared to Google. Yet what about its usage? How effective is DuckDuckGo compared to Google?
Search: DuckDuckGo vs. Google
There are a few interesting features DuckDuckGo offers.
First, bangs. In short, by inserting a website in the search bar anticipated by “!” it will give me back the page of that website with all the results for what I’m looking. For instance I inserted in DuckDuckGo search box !tc DuckDuckGo where tc stands for tech crunch followed by DuckDuckGo. In short, I’m saying to look for all the info about DuckDuckGo contained in Tech Crunch,
I will land on a page within the target website which is a sort of search or category page,
Another interesting feature is the instant answers. Since the beginning, Gabriel Weinberg focused his effort on providing answers to users’ questions. What today we know as a featured snippet on Google. Is DuckDuckGo instant answer more efficient than Google’s featured snippet?
Instant Answers vs. Featured Snippets
The future of search is more and more about answers. Also with the advent of voice search, people will be talking more often with their websites and looking for relevant answers. In short, the time in which search engines matched keywords is slowly going to end. Gabriel Weinberg understood back in 2008 that answers were supposed to be the primary purpose of a search engine. When humans look for something, pose questions (even though Google taught us to think in keywords).
The answers coming from DuckDuckGo are called instant answers and come from various sources (they say over 400 in total).
You type in a question, DuckDuckGo matches and trigger the answer,
Source: docs.duckduckhack.com
That is how you get the answer you were looking for!
Google is mighty when it comes to giving answers too; what they call featured snippets,
According to a study made by Stone Temple, in 2017 the queries that have featured snippets surpassed 350,000,
Source: StoneTemple.com
While DuckDuckGo explains how its instant answers get featured, we can only speculate about Google. In the same analysis done by Stone Temple, Google‘s featured snippets seem to favor tables above everything else,
In fact, that is why also for online marketers working with Google is more appealing. There’s a sort of competition between the company and marketers that try to figure out its algorithms. That sort of reverse engineering is also what makes Google more compelling compared to other search engines, like DuckDuckGo, where all you have to do is to go on GitHub and help improve the instant answer with DuckDuckHack.
Yet it is also what makes it scary. Imagine you have a website which has 99% of its traffic coming from Google. If one day Google decides to do a tiny update of its algorithm. That update can have a huge impact on your website. If your business is tied to your website, then your financial freedom depends on Google‘s changes of mood!
Google vs. DuckDuckGo: Who’s the winner?
Google is a powerful search engine that has a powerhouse at its disposal. In addition, at this stage, we are all biased toward Google. We learned what a search engine is when we googled it. We also discovered a series of search behaviors and formed search habits thanks (or due) to Google.
Therefore, when I do start using DuckDuckGo, after awhile I go back to Google. Switching search engine might be as hard as to stop smoking. Although the analogy isn’t fair (Googling is not as bad for your health as smoking) you got the idea.
Before you adopt something new after using something-else for years. There are only two ways for that to happen in my opinion.
First, you have to be very motivated. Privacy, in this case, can be a great motivational push to make the switch.
Second, the new technology has to be superior to the old one or at least surpass my expectations (the so-called variable reward). While motivation is what drove DuckDuckGo growth. The hybrid engine has still to grow to become as good as Google (personal opinion). Yet this is not something impossible to happen. In fact, if Google has an army of smart engineers, DuckDuckGo can rely on a strong community that believes in open source.
Before you go, I would like to answer the last question that popped into my mind while doing this research. If DuckDuckGo is a search engine, can you optimize for it?
Can you optimize for DuckDuckGo?
If you search around DuckDuckGo communities, you will see there’s no way to optimize for it. Yet this is only in part true. Even though DuckDuckGo takes most of its results from over 400 sources, it is also true that some of those sources can be optimized. In other words, even though you cannot optimize directly for DuckDuckGo, you can optimise indirectly by making your content easier to find from other sources.
For instance, since DuckDuckGo also uses Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex the first thing you can do is to submit your website to those search engines.
Also, links play a crucial role. Therefore, if you’re already implementing a backlink strategy, this will allow you to be also found by DuckDuckGo.
Last but not least, since the sources of DuckDuckGo are more than 400 you could optimise for some of them that work well with your content marketing strategy. For instance, I searched “Who’s Gennaro Cuofano” in DuckDuckGo to see where it was picking up the answers,
The interesting part is that you can use some platforms like Goodreads, LinkedIn, Quora, beBee, Amazon and so forth, to be featured on DuckDuckGo.
Another very interesting aspect is that the second result is a page coming from my website! Yet that is not a standard page. In fact, that page has structured data in the form of JSON-LD. Does DuckDuckGo like structured data? Maybe it does!
Summary and Conclusions
Throughout this story, we saw a few interesting take aways. Some related to entrepreneurs and startuppers. In fact, Gabriel Weinberg taught us that:
you have to experiment a bunch of side projects before finding what you are passionate about
once you’ve found an interesting side project, ask “would I like to be working on this for at least a decade?”
if yes then it is important to start getting traction before you launch. In short, you want to acquire potential users or customers (if that is a paying service) as soon as you have an idea
once launched you can experiment with 19 channels and see what’s best based on the bullseye framework
ask first, what’s possible. Then, what’s probable. Eventually, stick with what’s working
once growth starts to pick up it won’t last forever but it will bring you toward the next stage. At that point, you need to figure out other channels that suit and can fuel the next growth phase
What else? Another crucial aspect is community building. Since the beginning, it is crucial to find people that believe in what you’re doing and can contribute to the growth of your business. For SEOs you learned that there is space to optimise also for DuckDuckGo. And for Growth Hacking teams, you know that ideas testing and experiments are what make companies successful in the long-run.
For anyone interested in technology and the internet, we learned a precious lesson. Often when technologies arrive their impact is so strong that we forget how it was before. Most importantly we forget how it could have been. Take for instance the picture below that tried to predict how the first iPhone would have looked like,
Source: gizmodo.com
The journalist that wrote the piece remarked how those designs were dead wrong! And in fact, they were compared to the real version of the first iPhone. Yet what this kind of approach misses is the fact that technology does not have to evolve in one way. It can evolve in several ways. While in some cases some technological shapes, tools, and devices take over because more effective over any other. In many other cases, the choice of one shape, or technology over another is culturally, or simply randomly driven.
DuckDuckGo shows us that there’s another possible business model that can work for search engines. In short, it showed us that the future hides many more variables that we think it does. All we have to do is to be open to those possibilities!
Now it’s our turn. Are you ready? Duck it!
The post DuckDuckGo: The Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
September 7, 2017
The Three Things That Changed My Life For Better
In early 2015 I was still living in California. At the time I was spending countless hours on my computer and smartphone. For some reason, I was feeling miserable as the time went by I realized that my unpleasantness was caused by the screens that surrounded me. I didn’t have a name for that yet, and I wouldn’t have called it an addiction. But I understood I had to take action. What did I do?
I sold my TV set and with that money I bought an e-book reader and a few books on it.
As soon as I woke up, I would pick my phone and started to chat on WhatsApp. Instead, I began to use mindfulness for the first ten minutes of my day.
Last but not least I decided it was time to take drastic actions. That is how I gave up my super technological smartphone for a lousy phone that could only be used to make and receive calls!
How to Build a Habit-Forming Product Ethically: The Drug Dealer Test!
I didn’t have a framework or a model. I just wanted to stop that unpleasant feeling I felt each time I got hypnotized by those screens. That is what I did for two years. I gave up my social media accounts, WhatsApp and any other thing that was negatively affecting my mental. In that period I realized none of this stuff was necessary and that I could actually survive without it. Indeed, one of the main reasons I believe people do not give up their smartphones, or social media is because they fear they would go crazy without them.
Yet after two years without a smartphone, I also realized it may not be the best way to go. Why? Technology isn’t inherently wrong. In fact, you want to still make sure you take advantage of the many technological advances. However, you want to ensure to have a framework in place to help you out when the addiction is around the corner. Why so? People developing those technologies are incredibly smart. They learned the human psyche’s inside out to make their services stick and to form addictions that become unbreakable. Therefore, like the smart investor has a stop loss. So you may want to learn the power of stop cues.
In fact, one of the things that make smartphones, social media and screens so irresistible and addictive is the fact that there is no end to that bonanza. The feed is an infinite scroll that goes on and on all day long. You could potentially be scrolling for days.
Online chat, like WhatsApp, have no limits. There’s no number of messages you can send before the app stops working. That is why you start sending all kind of messages. Those chats become an endless loop. Think of the times you joined a group only to be tied to that group
So what did I learn in those two years without smartphones and social media (I still don’t have WhatsApp and don’t plan to install it back anytime soon and I use social media for work)? A few lessons.
Number one: become expert in setting things up
When we first join a new social media the thing we care least are the settings section. Admit it! When is the last time you went to the settings? If you did so, probably is because your app was working properly so you were looking for how to fix it. In short, we master the settings of an app only when there are things to fix. One thing instead I learned in those two years without a smartphone, social media and TV set is to master the settings before I started to use the app. In other words, each time I find out a new platform, app or device I want t make sure I understand the settings of that device. For instance, the first thing I did as soon as I had the smartphone back I set all my push notifications off! Unfortunately, most apps don’t make it easy on you. By default many apps, social media and programs are configured to give you any kind of notification. At the end of the day that is how they make their service sticky. Therefore, it’ll be for you to find the time to remove the minefields that sooner or later will make you an addict.
Number two: would you drive a car without breaks?
Another crucial aspect I learned to use stopping cues. In other words, since tech gadgets make it so easy for us to have as much as we want of a product, you may want to have a stop here and there. For instance, if you realized is time to turn your computer away switch it off (don’t put it to sleep, it will be too easy to open it up) and place it far away from you. The worst thing you could do is to have it very close to your bad. Same for your smartphone. Make things as hard as you can. In that way, you’ll leverage on laziness to break bad habits!
Number three: awareness starts from data
When I began to use Rescue Time, an app for my computer that tracks the way I spend time on my computer I was surprised to see how much time I was wasting doing nothing. It isn’t like I have to be productive. I’m not a robot. Yet instead of being in front of this screen for hours I could do things that made me feel and be better off in the long run. When I started measuring my activity I was able to identify my problems. From data starts awareness. From awareness starts any behavioral change. There’s only one caveat, data is useful but don’t get addicted to it!
The ideas from this article got inspired by Nir Eyal and Adam Alter. Below a podcast and a TED Talk to go more in-depth into the problem of addiction and technology
Suggested Reading:
Photo Credit: By Stock Unlimited
The post The Three Things That Changed My Life For Better appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
September 4, 2017
How beBee is Hacking Its Growth with the Hook Model [Case Study]
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It all started early this year when I first got an email that invited me to join a platform called beBee. I didn’t know what it was about, one concept captured my attention, “personal branding.” At that time I had a pain-point. I was looking for ways to amplify the content I published on my personal and company’s blog and to connect with other professionals. FOMO kicked in, and that is why I gave it a try. As soon as I got into beBee, I discovered a few interesting details.
People there connect through hives, which are small communities within beBee. Each hive is a topical area, from marketing to start-up, sales and so forth. Based on the interest you have you connect with other like-minded people. beBee’s members are called bees and each time you write a piece of content you’re “producing honey.” Saving some details for later, I found this new social media compelling. But most of all I discovered that knowingly or not they are using the Hook Framework to increase their retention and grow their users‘ base. As of 2016, beBee had 11 million members. They’re planning to reach about 40 million users in 2018. Let’s dive into it and see how they’re using the Hook Model to grow their social network!
How to Build a Habit-Forming Product Ethically: The Drug Dealer Test!
Source: Hooked, by Nir Eyal,
My note: I customised each quadrant to fit into the beBee’s story.
The Hook Model in Action
For me, the external hook was an email invitation I got from a trusted connection I had on LinkedIn. Among its channels, beBee is using LinkedIn as a source to grow its user base. In short, beBee is using a strategy that in the growth hacking world is called OPN (other people’s network). In other words, when your user base is still relatively small you have to rely on other already established networks (like LinkedIn) to bring some initial traction to your product or service. Going back to the Hook Model that external trigger, made me join the platform.
Once I joined I started to browse around, I immediately noticed two new concepts, which jumped to my eyes: hives and buzzes. Hives are small communities around topics. Buzzes, instead, are pieces of content shared by the member of each hive. Therefore, as soon as I joined I picked a few hives I was interested in (start-ups, content marketing, and marketing). As soon as I got into those hives, I noticed a high level of engagement. People were commenting, suggesting and reading other people’s buzzes. That is why I thought it was time to take action.
The first thing I did was to start curating some hives I found interesting. When you start writing on beBee, you’re “producing honey.” So when I began to produce honey I decided to focus on 5-6 hives I found most compelling to me. That is how my content curation effort started.
When I published my first buzz I almost instantaneously got a thousand views, dozens of people finding it relevant and sharing it. That gave me a sense of social proof quite unexpected. Things didn’t stop there. A variable reward soon arrived when I received a badge on my profile with the VIP Status.
I found out that beBee assigns the symbol to people producing honey regularly. In short, if you stop producing content you lose that badge. The community engagement, the curation effort, and the VIP badge made me go back and write some more.
That is how I started to invest a few hours throughout the week to become part of the community. It made me think about the IKEA effect, a cognitive bias that makes consumer of a product or service place a disproportionate value on products or services they partially created. Eventually, we attribute more values to things that we contributed to building. That is why I felt like the hives I curated were as important as my blog, in some respect. Therefore, as a community manager, I had to make sure to produce great content regularly. That is how I got hooked. Let me summarize the Hook features of beBee.
Summary and Conclusions
beBee is a new professional network that is leveraging on the Hook Model to grow its user base. With a mixture of growth hacking and Hook Model, beBee is allowing its users to become free referral sources through external triggers like Tweets, Likes or email invitations. When you join the professional network, you get drawn into the hives. Feeling the fear of missing out, you start curating your hives. When you get your first engagements and shares you start to take more action.
What makes the action escalate is a mixture of engagement and the formal recognition of a VIP badge you get on your profile. The hack is If you stop creating content you’ll lose your VIP badge. That is how you start investing more time into the platform to become a community member and get some more social proof. That makes the community grow at a faster pace because bees (beBee’s members) bring other bees to join the hives. In short, the Hook Model becomes a driver for both users‘ retention and growth. That is how you get hooked!
Suggested Reading:
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
The post How beBee is Hacking Its Growth with the Hook Model [Case Study] appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
September 2, 2017
(Case Study) Framework to Hack the Growth of your Blog with Quora, LinkedIn Publishing, Medium and beBee
In this article, I want to show you how to make sure to reach a large audience each time you write a piece of content. So that the time invested in producing it, won’t be wasted!
You wrote an excellent article. Strangely each time you put together a piece of content, it feels like that is the most incredible creative work you’ve done in your entire life. Therefore, high expectations arise. You look forward to the moment when you will hit the publish button and see that content go through the blogosphere, go viral and get featured on Forbes or Inc. Magazine. Yet that is all a dream. In fact, as soon as you hit the publish button you barely get your dearest friends to read it. Why?
Usually, who writes for passion believes that writing alone is enough to be read. Instead, when you start doing it professionally, you realize how deceived you were. In fact, creating great content is only part of the job. The rest is about making sure it gets found, read and shared. That is why as a content writer you need to have a framework in place to make sure each time you write a piece of content you reach at least a few thousand people that are ready to engage with it.
Also, today many believe that posting their content around the web still give them control over what happens to it. Ownership is only part of the equation. Indexing is as relevant if not more than ownership of content. Therefore, you want to make sure your content gets indexed on a platform you control before syndicating it anywhere else.
How Social Networks Hooked Us
In one of my previous articles, I talk about the Hook Model. I explain what it is and how to use it ethically to transform your product or service into a habit for the user.
How to Build a Habit-Forming Product Ethically: The Drug Dealer Test!
Yet one of the most powerful weapons social networks use to grow their user base is the feed. The feed is the most addicting feature social media have. Not surprisingly we spend countless hours scrolling that feed in the hope of keeping our excitement level high for as long as possible. Almost like a drug addicted millions of people use the feed as the main source to get the information they look for.
Source: mediakix.com
In other words, the average person spends five years and four months of his/her life on social media. That is why if you want your content to reach a larger audience you must learn how to use the social media feed to feed your blog‘s traffic. However, if you’re tempted to stop creating content on your blog and start disseminating only through social media, there is something you’re missing out.
Indexing vs. Ownership of Content
In the past all you needed was copyright. In short, once published a literary work that copyright did allow you to have control over it. Thus, you “owned” that piece of content.
Nowadays this is only in part true. In fact, the concept of ownership of content has changed. With the advent of the web and how search engines crawl it, ownership lost relevance in favor of indexing.
Indeed, each time you write a piece of content. You hit the publish button. That is how you’re claiming authorship on that. You want to make sure to have ownership on the publishing media outlet where your blog was posted. That is why your blog is the answer.
Start from your blog
In short, what matters is not who wrote the piece of content but where it was first indexed. For instance, let’s assume you wrote an article and published it on Medium. It doesn’t matter where you’ll post that content next. Since the article got first released on Medium, Google indexed it there. Creating an irreversible relationship among your story and a platform you don’t control!
Therefore, each time you publish on Medium, Quora, LinkedIn or any other publishing outlet it is almost like you’re giving up part of the “web ownership” over that content. Unless you use the following framework…
Content Amplification Framework
That is a framework in three steps with one objective:
GIVE YOU TOTAL CONTROL OVER YOUR CONTENT!
How? In three steps. First, indexing; second, spreading; third, experimenting.
Step One: Indexing
The first step is all about letting Google’s crawlers index your page so that your content is tied to your blog. Once drafted the coolest article in the blogosphere all you have to do is to hit the publish button!
As soon as you do so, billions of crawlers that are indexing the web will also walk on your page and understand where it belongs to. Time to take the second step.
Step Two: Spreading
Beyond the traditional sharing, you must do (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and StumbleUpon to mention the main ones). You want to syndicate your content on four major publishing outlets: Quora, LinkedIn Publishing, Medium, and beBee.
How to use Quora for Content Amplification
Quora is a social network where people post questions, and other people answer them. While Facebook is mainly about scrolling the feed passively, Quora is about actively engaging with a community of people that for the most part are interested in reading in-depth content. Back in March 2016 Quora had already over 100 million users, and it is the perfect place to start to build a following and amplify your content strategy.
If you don’t have an account yet see how to create one,
As soon as done go back and create your blog there.
Go on the icon on the top right corner, click on it and then go to “Blogs.”
On the top right corner click on “Create A New Blog.”
Once done, repost your article there! Why? A few reasons:
First, Quora will give you visibility that otherwise you wouldn’t have. Second, by having links that point back to your blog, you will drive traffic back to it. Third, less intuitive you might also improve your rankings (still testing this strategy out). In fact, when Google notices that your content is getting found (the original piece of content got first published and indexed from your blog) it may traffic back to your site.
Another thing to do is to atomize your blog post and use it to answer specific questions people on Quora have.
After personalizing the answer, you can insert a link at the end of the question so that people that want to know more can go back to your blog and read the entire article.
[image error]
How to use LinkedIn Publishing for Content Amplification
In 2017 LinkedIn, the most popular professional network in the world reached over 500 million users. Time to syndicate your content there.
If you don’t have an account yet follow these simple steps:
Source: Linkedin.com
You can use LinkedIn for sharing your content and for writing posts with an extract from your articles.
Therefore the first step is to share a post as I did below,
Since Neil Patel had retweeted my post on Twitter, I used that to reshare it on LinkedIn and get some extra visibility which brought few dozens of visits back to the blog.
Also, I got an extract of the post and written an article on LinkedIn,
You could either repost the entire article if you wish or just an excerpt from it and then a link to bring traffic back to your blog. Among the two, the former is the most successful to amplify your content as much as possible. For instance, each time I republish an article entirely on LinkedIn publishing I get way more traction compared to just an extract. My assumption is the LinkedIn algorithm makes your story seen more in the feed the more in-depth the article is. But at times it also depends on the time and day it got published. Also usually LinkedIn feed is like a diesel engine, a post or update you posted a few days before will be showed again to some of your LinkedIn contacts.
One more thing to do to optimize your profile for content amplification is to add your articles to your experience,
In this way, anyone that is browsing your profile on LinkedIn will check your articles,
Time to move on to Medium!
How to use Medium for Content Amplification
I don’t know this platform well enough. However, this is a media outlet with over 60 million unique monthly visitors. Also, the audience on Medium is more selected, which makes a perfect place where to share your content. Also, there’s an import feature that allows most to share your stories quickly. So why not to do it?
I’m not getting traction on Medium because I started using it recently. It takes time to invest to earn trust and credibility before reaping the benefits. I will do some experiments in the next future, which I will share. Do you want to be the first to know?
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Time to unravel another compelling personal branding platform, beBee!
How to use beBee for Content Amplification
beBee is a social media founded in February 2015. As of July 2016, it had about 11 million users even though they’re targeting to 40 million users. It is a brand new platform, and I find it has a great potential for both building business relationships and content amplification. What makes it unique? beBee is trying to bridge the gap between LinkedIn and Facebook by organizing its communities around shared interests, which are called hives. Let me give you a quick tour of beBee,
If you’re not yet registered, here the step-by-step guide to becoming a member.
As you can see, there are four main sections. Two relates to your professional profile and two to the content you share and interests you pick.
As for the public profile, you can update your information as you would do on LinkedIn. In fact, beBee borns as a social network. Therefore, you can also look or apply for jobs from there.
The private section is about the details which could be used by beBee that will get shared with the companies you have applied for. Now we go to the fun part, Hives, Buzzes and how to produce honey!
Hives are small communities within beBee that people interested in a certain topic can join. Hives are places where you can build your community by creating content, called Honey or by sharing relevant Buzzes.
When you write an article, you’re producing Honey that you can decide to share up to three Hives,
[image error]The same applies if you want to share a link to an article. That’s the Buzz, which you can share up to three Hives,
[image error] [image error]Instead, if you want to connect with more people, you have to look for bees! That is how beBee members get named,
From your profile, you can also check the stats,
As you can see the more people upvote your buzz (which in beBee is called “find relevant”), the more it goes viral.
beBee is a new experiment for me, and I will share the results I get on my blog‘s traffic in a dedicated post that you can check out if you subscribe to the email list,
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Time to the last step of this framework, experimentation.
Experimenting
Growing a blog is one of those things you do if you’re passionate about it. In fact, it takes a long time to build your audience, hone your writing skills and learn the marketing tactics to make your content found, read and shared. Yet it all starts with a mindset, which is about experimenting everything that leads to growth. Eventually, you’ll consolidate the lessons learned, leave the tactics that don’t work and compound your growth with what’s left. It takes a lot of tinkering. For instance, when I first started to write on my Blog, I used only to share my articles across social media without syndicating my content. Then I understood I had to change strategy. Now I use my content in multiple ways. For instance, at times it makes sense to atomise an article and make it become many smaller posts on other media outlets like beBee, Medium or Quora. In this way, with the same level of effort, you’ll be able to get more leverage on what you wrote.
It is time for you to do some tinkering now!
The post (Case Study) Framework to Hack the Growth of your Blog with Quora, LinkedIn Publishing, Medium and beBee appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
August 29, 2017
Five Killer Ways to Hack the Growth of Your Blog Now
Growing a blog is hard work but not impossible. In this post I want to show you a few tweaks to hack the growth of your blog. The baseline is always great content!
Fasten your seatbelt because we’re ready to take off!
Pick the perfect title
Journalists know that the title can make or break an article. It doesn’t matter how good it is what you wrote if none will open it none will read it! For how trivial that might sound, this is even truer for blog posts. With over a billion websites and over four million blog posts; the title is a great shortcut for our brain to make sense of the clutter.
To make your headline catchy, sticky but also good from the SEO perspective then there are a few factors to take into account. The main ones are,
Is your title emotional? For instance, invoking good or bad emotions can be a powerful way to have people read your stuff.
Is the title short? Too long would be bad for SEO. Plus none will know it. The right length would be around 52 characters.
What are the first and last three words? In fact, apparently, when people skim content they look the first and final part of the title.
Are there keywords in it? Those keywords are not only meant to make your content read by search engines but to capture the searchers’ intention
In other words, it has to be:
Emotional
Short but meaningful
Focused on first and last three words
Searchable
How to meet all those standards without hassling too much on it?
Simple, use CoSchedule Headline Analyser
That is what I did to pick the title for this blog post. Therefore, if you did open it, it may be thanks to it!
For instance, I initially picked up a title,
As you can see my score wasn’t that bad; However, I wanted to make it a bit better because it was too long and not as catchy as I wanted it to be!
I tried several headlines, and my score got worse,
Until I got the title, I was looking for!
Can you do better?
Make your blog the fastest in town
With the staggering growth of content on the web, the demand for it seems to be growing at a slower pace compared to the offer. In other words, there is so much content out there that it becomes impossible to consume it all. Therefore, when you do find what you were looking for you finally click on it, but the site is so slow that you eventually give up! That is even worse for mobile users. For instance, on average if your website takes more than three seconds to load you might lose up to 40% of your users! That can make or break your business. Thus, there’s no surprise that site speed is one of the most important factors for optimizing your blog.
Good news is you can now improve the speed of your site up to 30/40% in a few minutes and with no costs. Go on and check your speed performance, as I did.
I went to check my PageSpeed with Google Developers Tools, and that is what I got,
As you can see my site didn’t pass the test; Although not that bad from the desktop, it was bad on mobile. I can’t imagine how much traffic I lost due to that. How could I solve that? Google gives you some suggestions to make your website lighter, therefore faster. Yet I didn’t want to spend too much time on it. In short, I was looking for a quick and efficient way to improve the speed of my website right on. I figured that the most important factor affecting the speed of the website is your Media folder. That’s right! How many times did you unconsciously upload very large images? Well, now those images are burdening your site speed. It is time to compress them.
No problem though, I got the solution!
So I figured I could solve this issue very quickly through a WordPress plugin. That is called WP Smush. I uploaded directly from my WP website, installed it and activated it,
Then into the Media folder, I clicked on check images and started to compress them
After a few minutes, the compression was completed, and I had just saved almost one-hundred sixty megabytes in pictures. That’s impressive!
I checked my site speed again. I was impressed. My desktop speed went from 83 to 88. Ok not bad. What about mobile speed?
As you can see with this tweak alone, my mobile speed increased by over 30%, from 60 to 80!
That is how my website went from Sloth to Swift in the blink of an eye.
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Time to optimize your images
When you write a blog post you often use images, right? We know for a fact that our brain loves pictures. They are a faster and more effective way to communicate a thought, emotion and inspire action! Yet for how cool the image you picked for your blog post if search engines won’t understand it they won’t read it. The consequence is that your content will be only in part read by search engines which are the intermediaries between your blog and your audience. How to solve this impasse? Use the alt attribute.
That attribute is crucial because it describes what the image is about in the context of your blog, or article. Now adding the alt attribute is not hard but time-consuming. For instance, if you add an image to your blog you will have to add the alt attribute manually as I did on this picture,
You can partially automate this process by installing a plugin called Format Media Titles.
If there’s a title for that image, the plugin will automatically save the alt attribute, which will make your image optimization faster and more efficient.
Target Google‘s featured snippet
If you’re familiar with basic SEO, you know what a keyword is. In short, each time a user searches for something on the web it does so through a search engine’s box, like Google‘s
Until not long ago when search engines scanned your page (which is in SEO lingo is called crawling) most of what they saw was based on keywords. Therefore, the more keywords you stuffed into your page, the more you would show up in the search, which in the SEO world is called ranking.
Yet things changed dramatically when a few years ago Google updated its algorithm. The algorithm now looks more at context and the semantic behind the content you write rather than matching simple keywords. Also, common wisdom in the past would tell you to rank for short keywords (for instance “blogging”). Those keywords while can bring you traffic won’t bring you conversions. Therefore, if your objective is to bring more customers, you might want to change focus and look for long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is simply a very specific query of a user. An example? A question! Questions are long-tail keywords. Also, addressing a specific question of a user a great way to convert that into a customer. Where do you find those long-tail keywords?
You can find them through a tool called Anwer The Public.
That is what I did. I digited “blog” and selected my target country, US:
I got 158 questions users have about “blog.”
Those questions have organized in clusters. Now I can use them to optimize my content by focusing on the specific pain-points my target has.
With those questions, I can also target Google’s featured snippet,
If you want to know more about how to get your snippet read the post I wrote on Search Engine People:
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Use data to build effective CTAs
The adage says “Ask, and you shall receive.” This saying is true in life like in marketing. In fact, CTAs (call to actions) are a powerful tool to prompt your audience to take action. For instance, you can use them to inspire your audience to subscribe, purchase or just click through. How does a call to action look like?
Source: vieodesign.com
As you can see a call to action makes it easier for the users to go toward a particular objective that you set beforehand. Yet the most effective way to use CTAs is to A/B test them. In short, you will have two versions of a CTA (for instance, one button is blue, the other red) and see what converts more. There are several free tools to A/B test your CTAs. For this blog, I use Hello Bar.
For instance, my goal is to get more subscribers. I’m A/B testing my CTA,
As you can see in the first CTA, there’s “join us!” in the second “subscribe.” Therefore, when landing on my homepage, some users will see the first version, while some others will see the second. It’s still too early to say what’s best. I will wait for at least a thousand view on each to say what’s best. For now, the latter version is performing better.
All it takes is to register there for free, create an account and follow the instructions. In a few minutes, you’ll have your A/B test ready!
Summing up and conclusions
Growing a blog requires a lot of hard work. Yet there are a few tweaks you can implement to grow it fast and effectively. I showed you how:
pick the best titles
make your site fast
optimize your images
convert users into customers
and A/B test your call to actions
The rest is about producing great content!
The post Five Killer Ways to Hack the Growth of Your Blog Now appeared first on The Four-Week MBA.
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