SaaStr

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If you want to learn about venture capital and the world of enterprise SaaS, it’s hard to beat SaaStr, a bullshit-free online resource for all things SaaS.

Reading it over the last few months has really opened up my eyes to how the industry works. The topics range from raising capital, managing companies, the economics of venture capital firms, pricing, hiring, company culture, and more. Check out their best posts for the highlights.

Also, if these topics interest you, you can subscribe to new posts in your favorite RSS reader by searching for “saastr.com”. Highly recommended.

Tracking Blog Post Ideas

My friend Adam asked me how I’ve been keeping track of ideas for blog posts. For that and pretty much anything else that involves lists or notes, I use Workflowy:

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When I started this little daily blogging challenge I would have laughed at the idea that I could write every day for more than a few days. I just didn’t feel like I had that much to write about.

But when you force yourself to do a daily blogging challenge, you have to set the bar much lower in your mind for what’s worthy of writing about. If you restrict yourself to only one or two topics or only publish long, insightful posts then you probably won’t be able to blog daily for very long.

When I committed mentally to doing this, I suddenly had a lot of ideas for things that I could write about. They’re kind of scattered and some posts won’t be interesting to many people (and some to none at all), but that’s fine. It gives me enough to write about to keep it up and that’s what the challenge is all about.

On that note, I’ll hit a 30 day streak on Christmas Eve at which point I’ll take a break and start up again in January. I probably won’t try to do it daily again, but will try to keep posting once or twice a week going forward.

Thanks all for reading.

My Star Wars Action Figure Megacollection

In honor of the release of Star Wars The Force Awakens today I’d like to share with you all my flash talk from Automattic’s Grand Meetup this year.

Flash talks are short talks that every Automattician has to give at the Grand Meetup, a once a year gathering where the entire company gets together for a week to work and play. We can talk about anything we’d like so I showed off my childhood Stars Wars action figure collection.

Enjoy.

Related SNL clip from last week:

How would an evolving website work?

As a web developer who is also interested in A/B testing and evolution, it occurred to me that it would be fascinating to try to build a website that optimizes itself. I’ve been kicking around this idea for a while and wanted to share a few thoughts on it here to get feedback from anyone else that finds the idea promising.

Here’s the idea:

In traditional A/B testing, you specify multiple variations of some aspect of your site, measure which variation performs the best, then make the winner the default, and repeat. The types of things you test can range from simple headline and button color tests to complex tests that affect the user’s entire experience with your site.

In all of these cases though you have to figure out what variations you want to test. If you’re testing the headline, you need to specify which headlines you want to test. If you’re testing button color, you need to specify which colors to test, etc.

In the natural world, we see stunningly complex and optimized life forms that evolved little by little over billions of years. Evolution is similar to A/B testing in a sense, except that in evolution the variations happen by accident through genetic copying errors. Most of those mutations decrease the organism’s odds of reproducing, but occasionally they confer a benefit that causes that organism to have a better chance at surviving and reproducing. When that happens, the mutation gets passed on and may eventually spread to the rest of species over time. That “simple” process is what has led to all of the variety of life on earth.

Optimizing a web page through evolution poses many issues though.

How do you algorithmically mutate something on the page? Could you write a function that generates variations of a headline? Maybe. Would those variations be any good? Would you trust it enough to deploy into production?

I bet by analyzing tens of thousands of webpages, you could algorithmically identify common headline wording structures. Then maybe you could write code that intelligently customizes those headlines to your service.

You might be able to do the same with design. If you tried to categorize hundreds of homepage layouts, I expect you’d probably wind up with 20-30 common layouts that cover 90%+ of websites. Could you then write an algorithm that automatically tweaks your site’s layout to test these different layouts on your visitors? Could you do the same with color schemes? Maybe.

There’s also the problem of statistical significance. Running a simple two variation A/B test can take a long time if you don’t get a lot of traffic. Trying to get significant results for lots of algorithmically generated headlines might take forever. But maybe there are ways around that like the multi-armed bandit algorithm.

To sum it up, I think you’d need the following: a way to intelligently generate mutations on headlines, buttons, layout, etc + a ton of traffic or some novel method for picking the best variations + an organization that is willing to try such an experiment. It would not be easy, but I think it’s possible.

Imagine if it did work. Maybe your homepage converts users into sign ups at 10% now. You flip a switch, and in 6 months it increases your conversion rate 30% without any intervention on your part.

It would be revolutionary… if it worked.