Usando las pruebas A/B para determinar el precio ideal de su producto

Stop guessing! Use A/B testing to determine ideal price for your product

Oh, the question thou fear the most:

What price should I offer my new product X at?

Determining right price for your product is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks when you are launching a new product or service. Pricing for physical goods is simple. For example, if you are manufacturing staplers, all you need to do is to calculate cost of production and distribution, slam 20% margin on it and there you have the price you can sell your shiny stapler machines for.

Economics 101 (price elasticity of demand)

But for digital goods with no cost of production, it is not that simple. This zero cost of production complicates pricing decisions because then you need to price the product according to how much the market values your product. At the core, idea is quite simple: higher you price, lower the demand is. However, if your price it too low, you won’t make a lot of money even though you might sell a lot. Similarly, if you price it too high, you won’t make a lot of money even though each unit sold brings you greater amount of money. This is the basic principle of price elasticity of demand.

So, as you can see in the graph above, increasing price by 10% reduced quantity bought by 15% which reduced total revenues. Every product has a price point in the graph at which revenues become maximum. Price more than it, revenues will fall. Price less than it, revenues will fall. Of course, you can’t sit over coffee one evening and draw this price-demand curve for your product. It has to be discovered. Your market determines this curve and A/B testing is an excellent way to find out which price-point maximizes the total revenue.

How to set a price range for A/B testing

Theoretically, the price-demand curve is infinitely long. Price runs from zero to infinity (Y axis) and so does demand (X-axis). But, of course, practically you need to have a price range in mind which you think is suitable for your product. For example, if you are selling an eBook you need to see if $15 gets you more revenue than $9. And you would probably be wise enough to avoid testing selling it for $100. The key question here is: how to set initial price range for price testing?

The answer is: don’t just roll the dice. I’m pointing to an excellent, short guide on pricing software [PDF]. Even though it says on the cover that it is about software pricing, I have found it applies to many types of digital products. The basic gist is this: look for other similar products in the market and also look at the value your product is delivering. Set a price range accordingly. Once you have a price range in mind (say $50-$150), next step is to use A/B split testing to determine the exact price which maximizes revenues.

The Dark Art of Price Testing

Price testing is definitely one of the most difficult projects you can undertake. There are so many things that can go wrong. Consider this worst-case scenario: an influential blogger (say Mike from TechCrunch) is trying out your product and somehow gets to see that you are doing price testing. He writes about it on the blog (because, hey, it is fun to write about something controversial). Your customers read the post and get angry at you. Worst-of-the worst, one of the customers turns out to be idle lawyer and sues your company. It is a worst case scenario but quite plausible.

To avoid OMG, we got sued due to price testing, you should be doing price testing according to following rules (which I classify as the good, the bad and the ugly — in reverse order).

The Ugly: never offer exactly same product / service at different price points

Yes, you read it right. This is perhaps the way many companies do price testing but you should NEVER show different prices to the visitors for exactly the same product or service.

It’s illegal and can lead to huge potential lawsuit.

The Bad: have slightly different offering for different price points

This is a less nefarious version of plain-old price testing. Instead of showing different price points for the same product, you show different price points for slightly different product offerings. You can vary product offerings tested at different price points by adding or removing some trivial features. I will give you an example, if you are selling a backup service you can create one version where you offer 5 GB storage for $20, in another version you offer 5 GB storage + SSL (trivial feature) for $30. So, practically both offerings are similar but technically there is a difference and if anyone ever questions you, you have grounds for justifying the difference in price. After all, you are offering different products (no matter how trivial the difference is).

But I consider it immoral. Yes, you can evade potential lawsuits but anyone will know that you are fooling people.

The Good: offer different products (or plans or solutions) at different price points

This is the most ethical way to do price testing. Ideally, you should offer completely different product plans at different price points. Taking backup service as an example again, if on your pricing page lowest tier offers 5 GB for $20, test a version where you offer 10 GB for $40 and 2 GB for $8. You are trying to gauge sensitivity to price here. If your conversion rate 10 GB is same as that for 2 GB, this means your service is so compelling that people want don’t care if it is $8 or $40. So, in the next update you ramp up price as $40 for 5 GB (while still grand-fathering old customers). This way you would know what is the best price point for your service.

Of course, not all digital products have luxury of offering pricing plans. What if you are selling an eBook? In that case, you need to add some extra value (e.g. 15 minute consultation with author) if you are trying to test a higher price and remove some value if you are trying to test a lower price (e.g. shorter version of ebook).

The key lesson for using A/B testing to determe ideal price is this: offer different value at different price points to gauge price sensitivity of target market. Then whatever price offers maximum revenue, start offering your main product at that price point (while grand-fathering old customers).

Final Gospel: measure revenue, not conversion rate

I have suggested it earlier in the article but will make it clearer here. During price testing, you should measure revenue (not conversion rate). Because even though you may end up selling less (hence lower conversion rate) at higher price points, your total revenues may actually be higher.

Visual Website Optimizer lets you measure revenue by integrating with Google Analytics andOmniture SiteCatalyst. So, if you are measuring revenue in one of these analytics tools, you can easily see which price variation resulted in maximum revenue. (Even if you measure revenue in internal dashboard or excel, it should be quite simple to measure it for different variations)

So, ready to do some price testing?

Let me know your comments and feedback on the strategies I guess. If you need help setting up a price testing using Visual Website Optimizer, will be happy to discuss it with you. Just leave a comment below or email me at paras@wingify.com

Visual Website Optimizer

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Seleccione el modelo de precios adecuado a su negocio

SELECCIONADO SU MODELO DE PRECIOS

Quedase atado a un precio de $ 5 al mes precio de su producto le podría llevar a creer que es asequible para todos. Lejos de ello.

Los precios bajos dejan afuera un montón de clientes potenciales, de la misma manera que servir filetes de $ 3 en un restaurante realmente limita su clientela.

Si se trata de una aplicación SaaS o en un restaurante, usted primero entender lo que se necesita para atraer a su cliente objetivo, y decidir la cantidad de ingresos que usted desea obtener de ellos. Trazado de estas dos decisiones le ofrece tres opciones ...

Un proceso de ventas complejo para clientes de bajo valor no es un negocio viable, no importa cuántas nuevas empresas lo prueben. Es como vender panchos a $ 2 en un gran restaurante de cinco estrellas. Los números no cuadran. Como lo que hemos tratado antes, el precio ajo precio por sí solo no es perturbador, es sólo barato. Su ventaja competitiva tiene que escalar a medida que se mueve hacia mercados de lujo.

Joel York acuñó los ejes anteriores para definir los tres modelos de venta clave para las empresas de SaaS. Muchas nuevas empresas se abandonan a sí mismas en el cuadrante inferior izquierdo, a menudo sin comprender exactamente las decisiones que se han tomado. Aquí hay algunas empresas que encontrarás en cada cuadrante ...

Qué cuadrante eliges

Yendo por la parte inferior izquierda significa por lo general terminan con una gran cantidad de clientes de bajo valor. Esto limita la forma de adquirir clientes. Dropbox, por ejemplo, aprendió de la manera más dura como nunca pueden solventar adquirir clientes a través de la publicidad. Los precios bajos también limitan el soporte que usted puede ofrecer. Woothemes aprendió que no pueden sustentar apoyar a ciertos clientes. Los sacrificios son numerosos…

Ninguna de estas concesiones son intrínsecamente malas, pero deben ser conscientes de las decisiones sobre la base de su estrategia. Dependiendo de la industria, tipo de cliente y mercado potencial a su disposición, escoger el cuadrante equivocado puede dejarte muerto antes de empezar. Tres ejemplos:

• Algunas industrias son notoriamente difíciles de alcanzar, por ejemplo, marketing de contenidos no es tan eficaz en los dentistas, como lo es en los desarrolladores. Esto significa que es posible que tenga que pagar para adquirir clientes.
• Algunos se ocupan de las industrias en contratos anuales, NDA y SLAs. Esto significa que hay que invertir en un proceso de venta.
• Algunas industrias utilizan presentaciones de PowerPoint, ventas de formación on-boarding y entrenamiento en el lugar. Esto significa que necesita un contrato de alto valor para beneficiarse de un cliente.

eligiendo más de uno

Es común que las empresas tengan dos modelos diferentes para hacer frente a los dos extremos del mercado. Github, por ejemplo, compite en el punto de precio 7$/mes, pero también vende el Enterprise Github a $1K por mes a grandes compañías. Para servir los Github de más alto desempeño emplea un VP de Ventas, gerentes de ventas, gerentes de cuenta, y ejecutivos de cuentas.

El precio transaccional permite a los emprendimientos subir de categoría sin tener que cambiar de producto o modelo de negocio. Al asegurarse de que no hay límite en la cantidad de lo que sus clientes pueden pagar, los precios de transacciones evita el error común de los planes de precios. Haciendo a su plan maestro "ilimitado" coloca irónicamente un límite físico en la cantidad que haya ganado de un cliente. Como Joel Spolsky puntualiza, los planes ilimitados dan un descuento sorprendente a los clientes menos sensibles al precio, que menos lo necesitan, y que raramente lo van a apreciar. Es fácil añadir un plan ilimitado sin pensar ni planificarlo demasiado, y una vez ofrecido, es muy difícil de retirarlo.

Una ventaja de la aferrarse a un conjunto de planes de precios es que nunca estás en deuda con ningún cliente, tal como Jason Fried lo nota, pero una vez más esto debe ser una decisión consciente que se toma, no el resultado de un defecto incuestionable.

Al igual que con todas las cuestiones de precios, no hay "una única forma verdadera", pero hay un montón de giros equivocados y callejones sin salida. Evítelos y estará en buena forma.

Insider Intercom

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Estudio de casos de pruebas A/B que salieron mal

Las mejores prácticas pueden salir mal: 4 pruebas A/B shockeantes

Las "Mejores prácticas" de una compañía es asesina de conversión.

En nuestro seminario web E-Commerce Conversion Optimization, Chris Goward de WiderFunnel compartió varias pruebas reales A / B que destruyeron algunos mitos de las mejores prácticas. Examinaremos aquí 4 (ver lostodo, ¿por qué no echa un vistazo a la repetición?)

1. Promueva como loco sus promociones

Tiene sentido, ¿no es así? Ponga presión psicológica sobre sus clientes para convertir ahora en lugar de la salida a los competidores, durmiendo en la decisión o dejar que el evento venta caduca. Hazlo con "COMPRE AHORA" etiquetas, cantidad cuenta atrás en stock o sugerir el precio de venta puede no ser el día de mañana.

En realidad es un buen consejo que se espera convertir como locos para algunos sitios web. Pero no funciona para todos los sitios.

WineExpress ha probado un llamado urgente a la acción "para el próximo [Tiempo restante] y reciba $ 0,99 de costo de envío" durante un evento de promoción del envío de 24 horas.

El resultado fue una disminución del 7% en la tasa de conversión para la versión con la oferta del envío.

El análisis de marketing dice que el conocedor de vinos no es un cazador de promociones. Tiene menos probabilidades de responder bien a incentivos de ventas agresivas.

Un seguimiento de la prueba confirmó esta creencia. WiderFunnel probó una ventana llamada a la acción más grande con un mensaje de "en venta ahora".

El resultado fue una elevación del 5% tasa de conversión, y un 41% más de ingresos por visitante de la página original, sin la mensajería de venta.

Para este negocio, tal vez probar un incentivo de un regalo al conocedor del vino, tales como un protector de vino o abridor de botellas combinado con un mensaje de urgencia habría superado el control. (Una idea para poner a prueba, por no poner en práctica sólo porque suena como que podría funcionar.)

3. Seguir las convenciones de la web

Lea cuidadosamente a través de la lista de 500 principales minoristas de Internet y el 99,9% o superior presentarán el botón Añadir al carro de la mano derecha. Es una de las convenciones de diseño web más arraigadas que tenemos en el mundo occidental.

Pero eso no quiere decir que sea óptima?

Según las investigaciones de Jakob Nielsen, fijaciones de ojo del usuario sesgar fuertemente hacia el lado izquierdo de la página.

Baby Age cambió la imagen y realizó el call to action, ubicando un CTA del lado izquierdo lo que lo llevó a un 16% de aumento en la tasa de conversión.

No tenga miedo de desafiar el diseño convencional!

4. Sobre comunicar la seguridad del sitio

Todo el mundo tiene miedo de comprar en línea, ¿no? Tienes que recordar a la gente que usted es un sitio seguro, ¿no?

El uso de un distintivo de seguridad ha ayudado a mejorar la conversión en infinidad de sitios, sobre todo cuando proximal de los campos de entrada para la información financiera. Incluso hemos publicado 2 casos en los que la tasa de conversión mejoró 6.4%.

Pero esto no es una regla universal.

En este test de WiderFunnel, la versión sin el sello de seguridad ganó el test.

Realmente depende del sitio.

A veces, recordando a la gente sobre el riesgo de comprar en línea despierta FUD (miedo, incertidumbre y duda).

El punto de este post no es para decir que las mejores prácticas no importa. Por el contrario, seguir el consejo de "mejores prácticas" bajo consideración, y lo puso en pruebas (A / B) en su sitio web para ver si es de las mejores prácticas de su industria, la geografía, los clientes, los productos y contexto del sitio.

Get Elastic

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Alcanzando la masa crítica

Getting to Critical Mass: How to Start a Marketplace Business

december 8, 2010 by matt collins 4 comments

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 Are you thinking of setting up a two-sided marketplace business? It’s a tricky thing to do, so you’re going to need all the help you can get. Why not learn from how other people have managed it successfully in the past?

One challenge of creating this kind of marketplace is that you’re going to have to understand and meet the needs of two completely different communitiesand you’re going to have to somehow bring enough members of each community together to give your marketplace liquidity.

Why are Marketplace Businesses Attractive?

So why try to set up a marketplace anyway? After all, why not keep life simple and provide a product or service to a single community instead?

There are several reasons why marketplace businesses can be attractive:

1. They’re a natural fit for the information-sharing potential of the web.
2. Operationally, they can be simple: as a purely online business, there’s no inventory to look after and no service to deliver apart from the marketplace site itself.
3. The more users you have, the more useful the marketplace is. Thisnetwork effect becomes an important barrier to entry to potential competitors and goes a long way to explain the long dominance of sites such as Craigslist  and eBay  that, arguably, have done relatively little to innovate and improve over the years.

The Critical Mass Problem

Your marketplace will only be attractive to buyers if you have things on sale. Likewise, sellers will only be interested if you’ll be bringing them buyers. Often, to start with, you have neither. This chicken and egg problem can be a hard one to overcome!

8 Ways to Kick-Start Your Marketplace

1. Spin Out of an Existing Community

If you’re in the fortunate position of running a community that would be natural users of the marketplace, you could be in luck. SitePoint , a community for web designers, very successfully launched two related marketplace sites:Flippa  (for buying and selling websites) and 99designs  (a marketplace for web design). Both services originally started informally when people were posting messages advertising websites for sale and looking for web design services on the SitePoint forums.

2. Partner with an Existing Community

If you don’t own an existing community, you may be able to partner with one. You bring them new revenues; they help market the service to their members. There are various ways to do this which might involve giving them a share of the business or agreeing a revenue-sharing deal. Through white-labelling  you may be able to work with multiple partners in this way.

3. Capture Contact Details to Connect Buyers and Sellers at a Later Date

A visitor to your site who doesn’t find what they’re looking for isn’t necessarily a visitor wasted. Why not give them a form to say what they’re looking for. If, at some point later, it becomes available, send them an email to bring them back to the site.

GiftCardRescue , a US gift card marketplace, does this nicely.

4. Focus on a Niche

However broad your ultimate vision for the marketplace, you might want to start by focusing on a narrow niche. For example, a marketplace for buying and selling used electronics might seem very empty with only ten listings. A marketplace for used iPads with ten relevant listings could already deliver value and appear active.

Geography is one dimension of focus that is particularly popular. Many now-successful sites (Craigslist , for example) started in a single city and only expanded once they’d reached critical mass in their initial location.

5. Advertise

This can work if you have lots of money to spend (or can raise it), but otherwise gets expensive fast (especially if the first visitors to your site see barren pages with few signs of life — they’re unlikely to participate).

6. Contact Individuals and Invite them to Join

This and the next two tactics were all used by the founders of crowdSPRING.

While researching the business, Ross and his co-founder contacted freelancers and contractors individually and asked them about their problems with existing marketplaces and what they’d like from a new one. Later, when crowdSPRING was ready, he invited these same individuals to join their new site.

7. Ask Friends and Family to Use the Site

With a healthy number of freelancers already signed up to the site, crowdSPRING then needed to address the other site of the market: jobs for those freelancers to do. One tactic they used was to ask their friends and family to post jobs.

8. Subsidise Early Use

To further encourage use of the site, crowdSPRING covered 100% of the costs of the first 50 projects that were posted. They also paid 50% towards further projects until they were satisfied that the service was working well and was ready to stand on its own.

Further Resources

1. Brant Cooper has a post  on how customer development  applies to marketplace businesses. Worth a read if you’re a fan of Steve Blank  and co.
2. Mixergy  has an interview  in which Andrew Warner talks to Ross Kimbarovsky, founder of crowdSPRING, about how crowdSPRING got their outsourcing marketplace off the ground.

Matt Collins

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Masa crítica según Wikipedia

Masa crítica (sociodinámica )
Wikipedia

En dinámica social, la masa crítica es un número suficiente de adoptantes de una innovación en un sistema social, de manera que la tasa de adopción se convierte en auto-sostenible y genera un mayor crecimiento. Es un aspecto de la teoría de difusión de innovaciones, escrito mucho sobre por Everett Rogers en su libro Difusión de la Innovación. [1]
Los factores sociales que influyen en la masa crítica pueden incluir el tamaño, la interrelación y el nivel de comunicación en una sociedad o en una de sus subculturas. Otro es la estigma social, o la posibilidad de promoción pública, debido a ese factor.
La masa crítica puede estar más cerca de la mayoría de consenso en los círculos políticos, en la posición más efectiva es más frecuente que en manos de la mayoría de las personas en la sociedad. En este sentido, los pequeños cambios en el consenso público pueden producir cambios rápidos en el consenso político, debido a la eficacia de mayoría depende de ciertas ideas como herramientas de debate político.

La masa crítica es un concepto que se utiliza en una variedad de contextos , incluyendo la física, la dinámica de grupo, la política, la opinión pública y la tecnología.

Historia 
El concepto de masa crítica fue creado originalmente por el teórico de juegos Thomas Schelling y sociólogo Mark Granovetter para explicar las acciones y comportamientos de una amplia gama de personas y fenómenos. El concepto fue establecido por primera vez (aunque no se cita explícitamente) en el ensayo de Schelling sobre la segregación racial en los barrios, publicado en 1971 en el Journal of Mathematical Sociology [2] y más tarde refinada en su libro, Micromotives y Macrobehavior, publicado en 1978. [3] Se ha utilizado el término "densidad crítica " con respecto a la contaminación en su ensayo "On the Ecology of Micromotives". [4] Mark Granovetter, en su ensayo "modelos de umbral de comportamiento colectivo", publicado en el American Journal of Sociology en 1978 [5] trabajado para solidificar la teoría. [6] Everett Rogers más tarde los cita tanto en su importante trabajo de difusión de las innovaciones, en el que la masa crítica juega un papel importante.

Predecesores 
El concepto de masa crítica había existido antes de entrar en un contexto de la sociología. Se trataba de un concepto establecido en la medicina, especialmente la epidemiología, desde la década de 1920, ya que ayudó a explicar la propagación de enfermedades.
También había sido una idea regalada, si no se solidificada, del estudio de los hábitos de consumo y la economía, sobre todo en la teoría de equilibrio general. En sus trabajos, Schelling citas del conocido " El mercado de limones : Incertidumbre en la calidad y los mecanismos de mercado ". El artículo escrito en 1970 por George Akerlof [7]. Del mismo modo, Granovetter citó el juego de equilibrio de Nash en sus trabajos.
Por último, el ensayo de Herbert A. Simon, "Bandwagon y efectos oprimido y la posibilidad de predicciones electorales", publicado en 1954 en Public Opinion Quarterly [8], ha sido citado como un predecesor al concepto que hoy conocemos como la masa crítica.

La lógica de la acción colectiva y el bien común 
La masa crítica y las teorías detrás de ella nos ayudan a comprender aspectos de los seres humanos , ya que actúan e interactúan en un contexto social más amplio. Ciertas teorías, como la Lógica de Mancur Olson de la acción colectiva [ 9 ] o Tragedia de los Comunes de Garrett Hardin, [ 10 ] funciona para ayudarnos a entender por qué los humanos hacen o adoptamos ciertas cosas que son beneficiosas para ellos , o, más importante aún , por qué no lo hagas. Gran parte de este razonamiento tiene que ver con los intereses individuales trumping lo que es mejor para todo el colectivo , que puede no ser evidente en el momento .
Oliver , Marwell y Teixeira abordar este tema en relación con la teoría crítica en un artículo de 1985 publicado en el American Journal of Sociology.  [11] En su ensayo, se define que la acción al servicio de un bien público como " acción colectiva " . La "Acción Colectiva" es beneficiosa para todos, independientemente de la contribución individual. Por su definición , a continuación , "masa crítica" es el pequeño segmento de un sistema social que hace el trabajo o la acción necesaria para lograr el bien común. La " función de producción " es la correlación entre los recursos , o lo que los individuos dan en un esfuerzo por lograr un buen público , y en la consecución de ese bien. Dicha función se puede desacelerando , donde hay menos utilidad por unidad de recurso , y en tal caso , los recursos pueden disminuir. Por otro lado , la función se puede acelerando , donde los más recursos que se utilizan más grande es la recuperación de la inversión . " Heterogeneidad ", también es importante para la consecución de un bien común. Variaciones ( heterogeneidad) en los individuos ponen en valor un bien común o el esfuerzo y los recursos de la gente da es beneficioso , ya que si ciertas personas pueden ganar más , que están dispuestos a dar o pagar más.

Los medios interactivos 
Mientras que la masa crítica se puede aplicar a muchos aspectos diferentes de la sociodinámica, se hace cada vez más aplicable a las innovaciones en los medios interactivos como el teléfono, fax , o correo electrónico. Con otras innovaciones no interactivas, la dependencia de otros usuarios era generalmente secuencial, lo que significa que los primeros en adoptar influenciados los adoptadores posteriores a utilizar la innovación. Sin embargo, con los medios interactivos, la interdependencia es recíproca, es decir, tanto a los usuarios influyeron mutuamente. Esto se debe al hecho de que los medios interactivos tienen alto efecto de red, [1] en la que el valor y la utilidad de un bien o servicio aumenta mientras más usuarios se tiene. Por lo tanto, el aumento de los adoptadores y la rapidez para alcanzar la masa crítica por lo tanto, puede ser más rápida y más intensa con los medios de comunicación interactivos, al igual que la velocidad a la que los usuarios anteriores interrumpen su uso. Cuantas más personas que lo utilizan, más beneficioso será, creando así un tipo de efecto de bola de nieve, y por el contrario , si los usuarios comienzan a dejar de usar la innovación, la innovación pierde utilidad, empujando así a más usuarios a descontinuar su uso. [12]



El ensayo de Markus  
En ' ensayo de Investigación de la Comunicación titulada " Hacia una ' M. Lynne Markus Critical Mass ' Teoría de Medios Interactivos " , [ 12 ] varias proposiciones se hacen que tratan de predecir en qué es más probable conseguir una masa crítica situación de los medios interactivos y alcance universal acceso , un " bien común " con Oliver , et al. ' s terminología. Una proposición afirma que la existencia de tales medios es todo o nada, en donde si no se logra el acceso universal , y luego , con el tiempo , el uso dejará . Otra propuesta sugiere que la facilidad de uso y el mínimo coste , así como su utilización de una "capacidad activa de notificación " de un medio de comunicación le ayudará a lograr el acceso universal. Los estados tercera proposición de que la heterogeneidad , como se discutió por Oliver , et al . es beneficioso , especialmente si se dispersan los usuarios en un área mayor , y necesitan de interactividad a través de los medios de comunicación . En cuarto lugar , es muy útil contar con personas altamente codiciados para actuar como los primeros usuarios , ya que su uso actúa como incentivo para que los usuarios posteriores. Por último , Markus postula que las intervenciones , tanto monetariamente y de otra manera , los gobiernos , las empresas, o grupos de personas ayudarán a los medios de comunicación alcanzan su masa crítica y lograr el acceso universal.

Ejemplo Fax 

Una máquina de fax

Un ejemplo presentado por Rogers en la difusión de las innovaciones fue el de la máquina de fax , que había sido de alrededor de casi 150 años antes de que se hizo popular y ampliamente utilizado. Había existido en varias formas y para diversos usos , pero con más avances en la tecnología de los faxes , incluyendo el uso de ya en lugar de líneas telefónicas para transmitir la información , junto con la caída de los precios en ambos equipos y el costo por fax, la máquina de fax alcanzado una masa crítica en 1987 , cuando " los estadounidenses comenzaron a asumir que" todo el mundo "tenía una máquina de fax " . [ 13 ]

Referencias 

1. Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Print.
2. Thomas Schelling, "Dynamic models of segregation",Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1971
3. Schelling, Thomas C. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: Norton, 1978. Print.
4. Schelling, Thomas C. "On the Ecology of Micromotives," The Public Interest, No. 25, Fall 1971.
5. Granovetter, Mark. "Threshold Models of Collective Behavior." American Journal of Sociology 83.6 (1978): 1420. Print.
6. Krauth, Brian. "Notes for a History of the Critical Mass Model." SFU.ca. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. <http://www.sfu.ca/~bkrauth/papers/critmass.htm>.
7. Akerlof, George A. The Market for "lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. 2003. Print.
8. Kuran, Timur. "Chameleon Voters and Public Choice." Public Choice 53.1 (1987): 53-78. Print.
9. Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1971. Print.
10. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162.3859 (1968): 1243-248. Print.
11. Oliver, P., G. Marwell, and R. Teixeira. "A Theory of Critical Mass: I. Interdependence, Group Heterogeneity, and the Production of Collective Action." American Journal of Sociology 9.3 (1985): 552-56. Print.
12. M. Lynne Markus (1987). Toward a 'Critical Mass' Theory of Interactive Media: Universal Access, Interdependence and Diffusion, 14:491. Communication Research.
13. Holmlov, Kramer and Karl-Eric Warneryd (1990). Adoption and Use of Fax in Sweden. Elmservier Science.

Para leer más 

Philip Ball: Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-53041-6

Mancur Olson: The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, 1971

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Marketing de redes sociales: Desde cero a la masa crítica

Social network marketing: Getting from zero to critical mass

(above is a picture of  fun San Francisco tradition called Critical Mass  in which cyclists take over the street! Thank god I don’t drive much around the city)

What does it mean to hit critical mass?
I’ve heard several pitches in which an entrepreneur outlines a marketing plan for their business which is lots of hard work, but eventually they reach a "critical mass" point where all of a sudden magic kicks in, and smooth sailing is ahead. What these discussions often leave out is, what exactly is a critical mass point anyway? How do you know where it is, and how do you know if you’ve hit one?

To answer this question, let’s return to the original definition of "critical mass" from the Physics world:

  The smallest mass of a fissionable material that will sustain a nuclear chain reaction at a constant level.

What does fissionable material means? What is the chain reaction that happens for a web property? Let’s look at it from two separate contexts – user acquisition and retention.

User acquisition
One way to interpret this is that initially, your site has difficulties with user acquisition, until you hit some scale points in terms of total userbase. Then all of a sudden, your site goes "viral" and you start getting lots of users coming in. To formalize this idea, you could imagine the following happening:

• Initially, you are getting users through ads or PR, and your viral factor is <1
• As your site grows, word of mouth effects (bloggers, friends, etc) give you some name recognition
• This brand recognition increases your conversion rates across the board, thus boosting the percentages that make up your viral factor, increasing it to >1

That’s one way of viewing it, although I don’t believe that’s what most people mean. They usually mean that their site is not that useful until there’s a certain # of people on it, and when you cross the critical mass point, then the site becomes engaging. So let’s talk about this idea in an engagement context:

Engagement
As discussed above, there’s an idea that for a user-generated content site, you have an early bootstrapping problem. If you’re YouTube, but have no content, then no users will stick around. Yet if you have no users, then you have no one to upload content. So you need to break out of this local minimum until you cross some threshold – this is the critical mass point. To formalize this idea, here’s the retention focused view:

• Early on, you are getting users through PR or ads, but all your users bounce off the site
• However, each user you acquire have some chance of creating content (profile/pictures/video/etc)
• Eventually, new users have enough content to consume that they stick around on the site, perhaps messaging older users, who now return
• Once you have a "critical mass" of users, then there’s enough activity to keep everyone coming back

In this perspective, you can imagine that there are actually multiple phases that your user passes through – initially, they have a passive experience where they are pulled back onto the site because of notifications like friend adds, messages, etc. And it’s possible for your site to never get past this phase. However, if you acquire enough people, new users pull back old ones, who then start coming back, until they start using the site on a regular basis.

What "scale" of network does your website depend on?
However, the discussion above also neglects that users want to consume different kinds of content depending on how they view the site. For example, the following scenarios are probably FAIL states, even if on the surface they look good:

• 1,000,000 users composed of 100 strangers in 10,000 different locations
• 1,000,000 users who created 1,000,000 different forums with no cross-visiting

The reason is that the above scenarios represent ultra-fragmentation, with no ability to reach critical mass points. This illustrates that there are different scales of network, which reflect different product designs. These include:

• Networks of "real friends"
• Networks of online friends united around an activity or interest (WoW, anime, etc)
• Networks of people in the same local region
• etc.

It takes careful thought to figure out what network your product is really built on. It’s very common to see companies that are primarily targeting purely online friends build features that are really meant for people that know each other offline.

Similarly, even within a type of network, it’s important to consider the level of adoption within that network. You could argue that there’s a concept for a "minimum social group" which represents the smallest number of friends within the appropriate network, before a social tool is useful. This minimum social group concept is kind of interesting because
some applications only need a small number of friends to get off the
ground, and others need more:

• Skype: 2 minimum
• Mailing list: 4-5 minimum
• Forum: 10 minimum
• Social network: 10? 15? 20?
• … etc.

So I’d encourage anyone building a social site to really consider what type of network they are building for, and how many people they need at the local level. Once you can figure that out, then the next goal is to aggregate these smaller groups into a larger one. This is essentially what Facebook did – by understanding how to dominate a smaller space like a college, they could roll up lots of small spaces into a larger population.

Aligning your user acquisition to your network goals
As many have observed, startups working on the Local space have had a very very tough time, with the exception of Yelp. In Seattle, where I’m from, Judy’s Book raised a ton of money and then promptly closed shop because it was hard to get traction.

The reason of course, is that a regional network is a pretty specific one – there are tons of them – plus the minimum social group is actually pretty high. You need a lot of diverse people on the site, reviewing everything in site, before you hit a reasonable coverage % for reviews.

Similarly, if you are doing blind addressbook importing as the way to grow your userbase, but you aren’t targeted about what traffic you’re pointing into the viral loop, then you might end up with a bunch of users from Turkey or some other random part of the world. Probably also not what you wanted.

So to review:

• Critical mass is defined by what type of network your social product operates on, and how many users you need on that network before the product becomes useful
• Thus, critical mass is a product-by-product discussion – there’s no one-size-fits all
• Similarly, people that use your product go through a collection of "phases" – from ranging from passive usage where there isn’t enough content to consume, to the point where they are very active and creating content themselves. The threshold point between the phases is a local observation of critical mass
• Sites that are useful for "online friends" and don’t require too many people are the easiest to get off the ground (but have other issues, like they might be too niche)
• Site that are useful only for large numbers of "real life friends" (local review sites are a good example) are the hardest to get off the ground, yet are hugely useful if you can get people on board

@andrewchen

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Google mató a Microsoft

Windows Is Dead, Google Killed It

FARHAD MANJOO, SLATE

Windows is dead. Let’s all salute it — pour out a glass for it, burn a CD for it, reboot your PC one last time.

Windows had a good run. For a time, it powered the world. But that era is over.

It was killed by the unlikeliest of collaborations — Microsoft’s ancient enemies working over decades, in concert: Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, and most of all, two guys named Larry and Sergey.

Late on Monday, Microsoft announced its unsurprising $7.2 billion plan to buy Nokia’s smartphone division. Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of phones that run Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system (which is a bit like pointing out that, at 5-foot-6, I’m the tallest member of my immediate family). Microsoft is buying Nokia in order to control both the hardware and software in its devices; this move, Microsoft promises, will improve the phones themselves and make them easier to sell.

But this is the antithesis of the company’s Windows strategy. Though Microsoft insists otherwise, when this deal is done, the thing sold as Windows won’t be what it’s always been — it won’t be software that runs on lots of companies’ hardware, a platform to unite disparate manufacturers’ devices. Instead, Windows will be much like Apple’s operating systems, iOS and Mac OS. Windows will be proprietary software attached to proprietary hardware — Microsoft’s code running on Microsoft’s devices.

In a document that lays out the “strategic rationale” for the deal, Microsoft makes a stirring case for vertical integration: for a single company that makes both mobile software and hardware together. By purchasing Nokia, Microsoft says it will be able to create better phones by reducing “friction” between hardware and software teams that now reside in separate companies. Combining the companies also improves marketing “efficiency” and “clarity” — Microsoft can sell a single Microsoft device that bakes in the best services from both firms (Skype, Office, Nokia’s mapping systems).

Finally, vertical integration helps Microsoft’s bottom line. Today, for every Windows-powered phone that Nokia sells, Microsoft gets less than $10 in software licensing fees. When it owns Nokia, Microsoft will be able to book profits on hardware, too. Rather than make less than $10 per phone, it will make more than $40.

Steve Jobs long pushed against Bill Gates’ idea that hardware and software should be made by different firms. And back in the PC era, Gates was right. Gates recognized that most computer users didn’t understand hardware. We couldn’t tell the difference — and didn’t really care much about — the processors, drives, displays, and other physical components that made up one PC versus another. As a result, making PC hardware was destined to be a bruising commodity business, with low brand recognition, constant price battles, and dwindling profits.

But software, Gates saw, was a different story. Software had a face. Software imprinted itself on users — once you learned one Windows PC, you understood every Windows PC. Unlike hardware, software enabled network effects: The more people who used Windows, the more attractive it became to developers, which meant more apps to make Windows computers more useful, which led to more users, and on and on. Finally, software was wildly, almost unimaginably profitable. After writing code once, you could copy it endlessly, at no marginal cost, for years to come — and make money on every single copy you sold.

But mobile devices altered that calculation. Today, hardware matters. Unlike in a PC that you kept hidden under your desk, the design of your mobile device affects its usefulness. Things like your phone’s weight or the way your tablet feels in your hand are all important considerations when you’re buying a device; you won’t choose a phone based on software alone, and you might pay a premium for a device that’s particularly well-designed. In the mobile world, as Apple has proved, hardware can command just as much of a profit as software.

You might argue that once the basic design of a good phone or tablet becomes well known, lots of companies will copy it, and that hardware will again become a commodity. That’s the tide Apple is now battling against. At some point mobile components will become good enough and cheap enough that a $50 phone might function just as well as a $100 or $200 phone. When that happens, people will again start choosing devices by price, and hardware profits will dwindle to nothing. And, as happened with PCs, software, not hardware, will become the industry’s dominant business.

All that may well occur. (The fear of commoditized hardware explains Apple’s languishing share price.) But if mobile hardware does become a commodity and software once again becomes the determining factor in your choice of phone, we won’t see Microsoft profit from the shift. That’s because, in the last five years, a brutal, profit-destroying force has emerged in the tech world: Android.

Google’s mobile operating system — which is based on Linux, the open-source OS whose fans had long dreamed would destroy Windows — is free. Any mobile phone manufacturer can use and alter Android however it pleases. This accounts for Android’s stunning market share — close to 80 percent, according to IDC — and that market share gives Android the benefit of the network effects that once worked so well for Microsoft. Nokia was paying Microsoft $10 for every phone it sold, and in return it got an OS that can’t even run Instagram. Microsoft says that it wants to keep licensing Windows Phone to other manufacturers even after it purchases Nokia, but because they can always choose Android (which runs Instagram and everything else), few phone-makers are likely to take it up on that deal.

That’s why the Nokia purchase signals the end of Windows as a standalone business. There are now only two ways to sell software. Like Apple, you can make devices that integrate software and hardware together and hope to sell a single, unified, highly profitable product. Or, like Google, you can make software that you give away in the hopes of creating a huge platform from which you can make money in some other way (through ads, in Google’s case).

Slate

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