Only Dead Fish

Tom Whitwell on Pricing Strategy

A couple of weeks back I went to the second of the Harnessing Disruption events put on by the folk at AdaptiveLab (I spoke at the first one a while back). The events are nicely informal gatherings focused on the theme of disruption in media. One of my favourite short talks from this one was on the unexpected theme of pricing strategy and came from Tom Whitwell, former Head of Digital at The Times. Tom knows a thing or two about pricing in digital, being behind the introduction of the paywall strategy in 2010. I'm not necessarily a fan of the way in which the paywall was so all encompassing, but his talk was fascinating not least because (as Tom points out) pricing is psychologically interesting, but also because it has direct and significant business impact (what seems like small changes can have a huge effect) and yet is rarely talked about. Tom talks about some of the psychology involved, the experiences of introducing the paywall, and how they later went about transitioning customers to enable them to double the price. The folk at AdaptiveLab will be doing more of these events and they're rather good. If you want to be notified about the next one you can sign up here.

More Development On Fraggl

Last week we did a big development sprint on Fraggl. Since we launched the beta in December sign ups have far exceeded our expectations (which is amazing) and open and click rate (two key measures for us) have remained consistent and consistently higher than industry average (by a large multiple). We did a user survey a couple of weeks back and that enabled us to validate a number of approaches we've taken as well as get some broader feedback. We've been making regular tweaks to the service but wanted to push through some bigger changes and also do some more work on the forward looking roadmap. So it's a good time to do a bit of an update.

To begin with, we've implemented a number of fixes including the removal of duplicate links (occasionally something was getting surfaced more than once), further tweaks to the algorithm, and (importantly) the implementation of responsive formatting to make it play nicer on mobile. We're also redesigning the website to improve the UX, and working on a better reporting app that can give us improved insight into current usage.

Looking forwards, we've done a lot of thinking around developing the roadmap, and what the future offering and model could look like, doing things like starting by writing the release for our idea (aping the Amazon product development process), creating mock-ups and walkthroughs that explain the user experience, making a pitch deck and so on. We have some tremendously exciting ideas around how the Fraggl offering could develop, how we can create more value for our users, and how we might take the product into some new areas working with some interesting partners (more on that soon). As part of this we're running an experiment to see what happens when we plug the algorithm into a pre-curated list from a different vertical subject area and the results so far have been really interesting, so lots to think about.

In the meantime, our thanks to all those who have provided feedback so far, and watch this space (and Fraggl on Twitter) for more updates. And if you'd like to try Fraggl out, you can of-course sign up here.

End Every Day With A Beginning

I loved this advice from Todd Henry for staying focused through long-arc projects and remaining less prone to procrastination and the 'assassins of creativity', particularly when we start work at the beginning of the day. Instead of always beginning with the end in mind, says Henry, we should end with the beginning in mind. His two-minute strategy (and I quote):

1. Before you close out your work for the day, capture any open questions that you are currently working on. If you were to continue working right now, what would be the very next thing you would do?

2. Write those questions and the next thing you would do on a post-it, or a sheet of paper, and leave it where you’ll see it the next day.

3. Determine right then what you’ll do first when you next sit down at your workstation. Establish a starting point for your work. This will give you immediate traction. Having something to do prevents the paralysis that accompanies needing to decide what to do.

Henry quotes Hemingway who said that “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck". Sounds like good advice to me.

HT 99u for the link

Photo Credit: jakeandlindsay via Compfight cc

This Week's Favourite Fraggl Links

Here's my favourite links from this week, curated by Fraggl:

• What a great idea. Sammy Screamer (above) - a cute little motion sensor controlled by your phone with lots of applications
• I liked this talk from Tracey Follows at the APG's Noisy thinking event on 'Planning 3.0 - Planning without a roadmap'
• A great feature on the work of Genevieve Bell, cultural anthropologist and social scientist at Intel Labs, and her team
• This piece debunking 5 myths about introverts and extraverts at work is absolutely fascinating

And of-course you can sign up to Fraggl here.

Change is a Process, Not an Event

These are four paintings by the artist Stephen Taylor. They are four of my favourite paintings, and I have copies of them hanging in my living room. I wrote about Stephen here. He spent most of two years in a wheat field in East Anglia painting the same oak tree. He painted it in a huge variety of weather, light, and detail. He painted when the wheat was ripe and blown by a late summer wind, when the snow was thick on the ground, when the earth was bare and cold. He painted in the early morning light just after sunrise, in the heat of a summer midday, and when the tree was lit only by moonlight. A whole series of paintings capturing the complexity of a single living thing and the living things that surround it. Alain De Botton devoted a chapter of his book on ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’ to Stephen describing how his approach to the painting of the tree was about the story not of each individual leaf but of the dynamic mass of the whole.

I've used this before now as an analogy for change, to make the point that, much like the tree through the seasons, change is a complex thing that is likely to have multiple dependencies that all influence and impact each other, but more than anything it is a process, not an event.

I have a personal example of this – in 2006, just when so-called 'Web 2.0' or the social web was beginning to take off, I was working for a large publishing company. I strongly believed that this new connected world was going to going to change everything about what that company did. But it felt like nobody was really taking it seriously enough. So I put together the most compelling presentation I could, full of unassailable facts about how this was going to change the world, and I went round and presented it to five operating boards that ran the different divisions of the business. I got to the end of that process and sat back, expecting a tidal wave of new ideas, innovation, changed thinking. But nothing happened.

I had forgotten that not everyone had been on the same journey that I had. I had wrongly assumed that one powerpoint deck would bring change. It was a valuable lesson for me in the importance of taking people on the journey with you. Change is a process, not an event.