invest in pyra!!!
The future of Pyra Labs
For those of you not acquainted with Pyra Labs, they are the people that brought Blogger to the world, and in doing so unleashed thousands of amateur publishers upon the Net. If you don't know what a weblog is, here are a few examples:
A personal weblog
A topic specific group weblog:
A mass general group weblog:
A newspaper weblog:
A journalist weblog:
In short, it is a form of publishing that allows even the most tech unsavy to throw their thoughts onto the web.
Blogger was not the first weblog service, however it was the first to provide a service through a central server, i.e. like Yahoo mail: you aren't required to download any software, and the service can be accessed from any computer. The simplicity of it, and the fact that it was free, fuelled enormous growth from its launch in 1999 - with upward of 400,000 websites now powered by Blogger.
Like a number of companies, subsequent to their initial success in terms of scope, they have been trying to develop ways to generate proper revenue.
Earlier this year they launched a premium service - Pro Blogger - sold under the tag line 'it's better.' In doing this they followed what I consider to be the correct approach - they kept their initial offering free and positively introduced a premium service that was genuinely a premium service. No one lost out.
So what is Pro Blogger like?
For sometime I've wanted to start a weblog covering online marketing, but have resisted the temptation, knowing the level of commitment required to consistently produce something half decent. However last week I decided to throw caution to the wind, and take the plunge headlong into this time consuming vortex, from whence few return. As I was already familiar with Blogger and liked and admired the people behind it, there really was no competition for my custom. Pro Blogger it was to be.
Being the spontaneous individual that I am, I decided to signed up for Pro Blogger immediately, so as not give myself the opportunity to change my mind. In doing so I did not read the FAQ section particularly carefully, assuming that I knew exactly what Pro Blogger was.
What I required from Pro Blogger was fairly simple. I wanted a site up and running quickly, I wanted all the hosting stuff to be sorted, and I wanted to be able to put it under my own chosen domain name. Oh yeah, I also want to be able to have a newsletter.
Stupidly I thought that Blogger Pro would deliver most of this. However, that was not the case. In the end I wasted a reasonable amount of time, money and effort, before finally ending up with a solution, Net Marketing, that was not quite what I wanted. Part of this fiasco included me buying hosting from easyspace.co.uk only to find that they wouldn't let me ftp to their site using Pro Blogger.
So what can be learnt from this experience, apart from how useless I am? Well, Pro Blogger was to my mind meant to have made it easy for me to get up and running. In that respect it failed, based on the specific criteria that I set it. Now I totally accept that I'm technically incompetent, however that is not the point, many people are. I ended up forking out $100 ($47 to Pyra Labs) and in the end did not get what I wanted. I also wasted a lot of my time, and others, probably to the tune of $200+.
Pro Blogger is great, however getting a site up and running using Blogger is not as simple as it could be, which to me is an important part of the equation. Were my expectations really too high?
Pro Blogger
Domain name
Full hosting without advertising
A newsletter
Visitor statistics logging (something else that I had to waste time sorting out).
That is the package that I wanted, and I would have paid up to $200 for it. Others will have different needs. The point being, why don't Pyra Labs offer a variety of packages? Clearly a teen diarist needs are different from those of a journalist looking to further extend their ego.
When you have a userbase the size of Blogger, there is great potential for leveraging significant value out of it. Add to that a product as good as Pro Blogger and the possibilities become considerable. However to maximise this potential Pyra needs to offer a variety of options. That is the basic principle of up selling. Furthermore, as illustrated above, making peoples lives simple (even those like me that are so stupid that they don't really deserve it) is in itself a service, and something that would be greatly appreciated, and happily paid for. Pyra offered me 1 Pro Blogger package, or 2 if you count the option to remove ads. As someone who likes choice, I would have preferred to have been offered 5-10 choices. Look at it this way - they will get $50 out of me yearly, from now on, but with a touch more thought, they could get a great deal more, and made my relationship with them a great deal stronger.
Increasing Pyra's business scope
From where I'm sitting Pyra Labs has a wonderful opportunity to build upon their base, and turn themselves into a really successful company for the long term. In crazier times, analysts might have valued them at $20 to $50 million. However, in today's market up starts need to really prove their worth, and do so to an almost unreasonable degree, before they are taken seriously
Pyra, in my opinion, deserves to be taken very seriously. They have a community of 400,000 websites, everything about their set up is positively compounding in nature, and they have limited direct competition.
Pro Blogger is very good as it stands, and there are a number of improvements in the pipeline that will make it even better. However, what they perhaps need to remember is that business is not just about developing great products, but also requires attention to be paid to the overall customer experience. Pro Blogger is not just publishing tool, it is/should be, a service that allows people to develop and run a multi-functional website with as little hassle as possible.
So what is the problem?
As outlined above, they need to offer more, and start building more aggressively on their existing proposition. The impression that I get is that there is the will to do as I suggest, but not the manpower and resources required for delivery. Through bad timing as much as anything, the level of funding that they deserve does not appear to be forthcoming, and therefore the company is being built upon the toil of far too few people. Looking at their operation from the outside, I get the strong impression that it is still far closer to being a techi project/hobby than a proper company. To my mind, such a situation is unacceptable given their potential.
To be honest, it actually somewhat surprises me that this appears to be true. Pyra has good investors, including O'Reilly & Associates, Advance Publications, Jerry Michalski, and The Accelerator Group. In combination, these organisations have an extraordinarily clear take on the future direction of technology and the Internet. I would have expected such backing to have allowed Pyra to grow at a rate that was at least vaguely consistent with its potential. As things stand, that is certainly not happening.
In a certain respect I think that Pyra's position may be somewhat indicative of this post Boo! era. If Pyra had kicked off 2 years early it is likely that they would have been hit by a flood of venture capital, and then fast tracked to IPO. As things stand it appears that they are being drip fed, preventing them from expanding at anything more than an organic rate. That is a serious error.
Weblogging is starting to explode into the mainstream, and Pyra should be the major benefactor of this a trend. My fear is that without proper resources, numerous opportunities will be missed. It seems clear to me that Pyra is in real danger of becoming an example of excessive prudence at its very worst. To my mind, their investor would do well to remember that potential can still be equally as strong, regardless of the market conditions that surround it. The process should be simple - If you find a winner, trust your convictions and back it to the hilt.
Robert Loch is the Deputy Editor of Dotcom Scoop and a marketing expert. He can be reached at robertloch@dotcomscoop.com. Robert publishes the Net Marketing blog as well.
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