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  • Toni 4:24 pm on February 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    The 2% rule 

    The more time I spend around web services, the more I see 2% conversion rates show up all over the place. About 2% of people who visit a WordPress.com blog leave a comment. 2% click on “related articles” below a blog post. 2% of Evernote users buy their premium service. Same with 2% of Box.net users. We see similar numbers with WordPress.com premium upgrades. Is this a coincidence, or is there an underlying law that drives this? If you put something for free on the Internet and ask people to engage and take some sort of action, 2% of them will do so on average? I say on average, because I’ve seen 1-5% ranges on various services, but the 2% number seems to be the most common.

     

    • Donncha 1:55 am on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      I think the same is true of anything. Those willing to help out with plugin development, or donate, or help at a club will be a tiny minority of the total users. Is it human nature? Are we all selfish at heart?

    • Mark Jaquith 5:36 am on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      It will be interesting how this changes as the Internet continues to expand its audience. What happens to that number as Internet users become, on the average, less technical?

    • Steve Krause 9:32 am on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Tony — For decades, 2% has been the rule of thumb for expected response rates to direct-mail campaigns. More randomly (or maybe not), when the Washington Post had the concert violinist Joshua Bell play as an anonymous street musician in a commuter plaza, the donations he received amounted to a 2.5% response rate from those who passed by: http://www.stevekrause.org/steve_krause_blog/2007/04/stubborn_respon.html

  • Toni 10:57 am on February 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Automattic anniversary 

    Last Saturday marked my fourth anniversary as CEO of Automattic. It’s been an amazing time so far. I think 4 years is the longest I’ve ever been with one company. It’s also the length of an undergraduate college education (!) which gave me the idea to make a list of things I’ve learned during the last few years. The list is getting pretty long and is looking like a good set of suggestions for a series of blog posts about “Lessons learned at Automattic (so far)”. I’m hoping to do a post every week or two, starting with some of the topics I often get asked about:

    • Open source business models: How did we structure Automattic as a commercial entity that both benefits from and supports the open source WordPress project?
    • Distributed companies: We are a team of 50 people spread across 12 US states and 10 countries. How do we make that work?
    • Internet scale services: We run multiple web services that see hundreds of millions of visitors a month. How do you reach an audience the size of Amazon’s and AOL’s with a small startup team?

    There’s a lot more. Feel free to suggest what you think would be interesting to hear about (and to nag me if I don’t follow-up!).

     

    • Sean McCue 12:40 pm on February 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Congratulations Toni!

    • pinaldave 1:10 pm on February 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Many Happy Anniversaries. You guys my blog rock!

    • Yuval Levy 4:48 pm on February 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Congratulations! Wishing you many more years of success.

    • Matt 7:16 pm on February 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      You started on my birthday — a fantastic present. :)

    • Brian Oberkirch 7:43 pm on February 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Huzzah! Maybe you could write about acquisitions. You guys seem good at identifying opportunities and actually making it work for the larger mission. You guys are swell & are good for the Web. More, please.

    • Matt Thomas 5:07 pm on February 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Is it bad that I’m terrible with anniversaries, birthdays and even names, but always remember my Automattic anniversary every year? Here’s to many more! :)

    • Chris 3:08 pm on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Nice – congrats Toni! 4 years is a good chunk of time :-) Would love to hear more about the distributed company model…

  • Toni 5:00 pm on January 29, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    And at this prompt, you could type in an entire program, and then type RUN, and it would motherfucking run.

    dive into mark (via a different Mark)
     

    • Lloyd Budd 11:49 am on February 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Unfortunately Toni, because your quote includes the F word, we are not going to be able to accept your iPad app, because it might be used to view this site.

  • Toni 8:41 am on January 26, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    BCWax launches, with a fantastic blog post.

     

  • Toni 9:26 am on January 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    The WordPress Foundation has an official site now.

     

  • Toni 8:52 pm on January 15, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Braughm, this one is for you:

     

  • Toni 11:43 am on January 12, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    One of my first tech jobs was an internship I scored at VPL Research, Jaron Lanier’s virtual reality company, back in 1992 while I was at Stanford. It was very exciting, I got to mess around with million dollar VR simulators and hang out with some really smart programmers. Today I saw that Jaron has a new book out with some provocative thoughts about the downside of the open internet culture.

     

  • Toni 12:08 pm on January 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    I had fun the the Crunchies last night – the Richter Scales were once again totally hilarious (jump to the 60 second mark): http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/3847418

     

    • tony 7:02 pm on January 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      me too – it was fun to be part of a group that was nominated

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