the goose

I was pretty late to the twitter scene but I was convinced that it was going to be huge.  About 5 months ago I put together @agtweet as an exercise in getting my head around it all.  I had this marketing plan and I thought I’d review how things went.

First up it might be worth mentioning that it appears as though twitter take up in Ireland is slowing.  For the last three months I’ve been tracking new accounts and there seems to be a downward trend although the first months data could be skewed because I was busy finding all the new people.

So what was the strategy?

Rather than try to build up individual customers, my strategy was to try and find a sponsor who could effectively pay for all the costs and a modest profit for myself.  This started off very well.  Through twitter someone got in touch who wanted to sponsor a number.  I quoted €300 per month in return for adding a o2 number to the meteor and vodafone numbers already on offer.

I was pretty chuffed with my initial success.  I made an error though. I didnt’ close the deal.  I had started to line up meetings with ad agencies around town in the hopes of getting a major brand to sponsor the whole kit and kaboodle.  As a result I delayed asking for payment details.

“If it was that easy to get sponsorship, I should hold out for something bigger”, I cleverly told myself.  The meeting with the agencies were going well with lots of interest and excitement.  I had 3 in total.  It was actually great to get to talk to these guys but although the service seemed like a nice idea, there was no real way to tie it into any of the brands that they represented.  Actually, one company did suggest that I invest a thousand euros in a affiliate marketing scheme to help sell product for a customer.  Cheeky – sure god loves a try’er.

By this stage I had decided to dream up ways I could offer a number of different price points to potential sponsors.  I offered plans including

• basic sponsorship (logos on the site etc)
• headline sponsorship (exclusive sponsorship of the whole thing)
• naming rights

The name rights I put in at about €50k while the basic sponsorship rant to about €5k.  Here is template for the sales presentation I made each time around.

Of course as soon as I started this type of talk, I remembered why I don’t like big ticket sales in the first place.  After a couple of weeks, calls started to go un-answered, emails were being ignored and finally after about 2 months I realised that this wasn’t going anywhere.  In hindsight I can see how I didn’t nearly push hard enough or present a good enought case.  Why would’t anyone build it themselves?

Of course by that time my €300 a month sponsorship had disappeared.  A case of a bird in the hand is better than stonk load in the bush I’m afraid.

So now what?

Now, there is a case to be made to trashing the whole thing.  So far there are 1,006 registered users.  There was an initial spike as the press release was picked up by Silicon Republic.

The graph to the right shows the total nubmer of tweets sent by agtweet while the graph to the left shows the number of new accounts created both by month.

So now what?  I have 1,000 odd people who signed up with about 300 of those having used the service more than 20 times.  Within that 77 have used the service more than a hundred times.

The really nice thing about the service is that (I think) its pretty easy to figure out what people want.  Top of the list is

1. Replies to their phone by SMS or email.
2. The ability update multiple accounts
3. A tie with with facebook so that both update at the same time.

The replies are easily the most requested feature.  I’ve implemented a SMS reply feature but I’m reluctant to roll it out as (a) the texts cost me money and (b) scanning all 1,000 accounts for updates will bog down my machine which really has a day job doing something else.  I’ve split out the code so this scanning can be done on separate slave machines but they’d still have to be paid for.

A couple of people have come up with ideas for delivering updates without incurring an SMS cost but I’m still stuck with the server load issue.

I guess that I might get 10 people paying for this service.  I’d have three plans and the margin on text messags would be somewhere around the 100% mark up but that would still only amount to 10 x €10 for 100 credits * 100% margin = €50 a month.  Plus, there would be a stonk load of customer support to deal with (there always is with SMS) so it just wouldn’t work.

I spent quiet some time selling SMS and I’ve no real desire to go back there any time soon.

So what next?  Well the obvious answer is “walk away and do something more productive with your time”.  I might as well learn as much as I can while I’m at this though.  I like the idea of offering an ‘limited invite’ system that would help promote the service.  Maybe I’ll leave the SMS reply in the hands of a few chosen ones for a while and try and stir up some buzz that way.