Expiring Shoutmix

After at least 6 years of using ShoutMix on this blog, looks like Snecx is finally putting up his compulsory pay wall to sustain the business. He explains his rational in an open letter.

I guess after only 250 legitimate messages and having to manually deal with thousands more spam messages, it’s a great time to close this and stick with wordpress comments and possibly Zopim.

If you also have shoutmix on your blog, and you have decided not to upgrade, you might want to archive your data this year.

If you’ve perl running, here’s a quick script to scrap out your data for future archive or import to your new tool. Steps (should be obvious if you can manipulate this):

1. Go to your ShoutMix box and scroll to the bottom and cilck “View all messages” (should be a URL like http://www2.shoutmix.com/?[[yourusername]]=viewer, might be different for you)
2. Download all the HTML source codes, into files (e.g. shoutmix1.htm, shoutmix2.htm etc. sorry too lazy to write crawlers, I’m sure you can wget or curl your way through) and combine them (again for lazy me I did copy shoutmix*.htm combined.htm on a windows command prompt)
3. Run the script (you can rename it – it’s .txt to appease wordpress) with the combined file as input and output it to somewhere, e.g. perl smparse.txt < combined.htm > raw.txt – You can choose CSV etc.
4. Verify and Manipulate the way you need (e.g. open in excel, use Text to Column feature if it doesn’t convert the tabs correctly)

You only have a few more days to archive it, or upgrade to premium to download. Frankly, if you don’t understand the above and still want to hold on to your data, I suggest that you give the poor guy some credit and drop him a few bucks to get nice archives.

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Here comes the rants section (with all due respect to Mr. Tan for passionately and honestly trying to push through a business).

Pay walls and Product Positioning
Although Apple did partially break this rule, but in general, the gulf between free and the first dollar is really very wide. Once someone decided that the value that your application is not worth paying for, no pricing structure / offering / discounts can lure the customer to paying. However, if the entire value proposition of the application changes, there’s hope.

This is the primary dilemma of any freemium model. It’s not your feature set, but the perception of your product. Some telcos still earn a hell lot of money selling you “Caller ID” at $5 a month, amongst other Value Added Services (or VAS). Compare that with the amount of investment it takes to make Angry Birds, which retails at 99 cents and it’s a one time payment.

Thus before putting up a pay wall, try asking yourself if you have fundamentally change the value proposition such that it becomes closer to something that’s perceived to have a paid value. In this aspect, I think ShoutMix has not really shifted, even though there’s a plethora of new features and integration available.

Sell Benefits to Well Defined Customers
However, an even stronger thing stands out, which is either the smartest thing or the dumbest thing of the latest iteration. The site has no clear customer segment. It seems to target everyone in the world with websites, but it doesn’t provide a bearing as to WHO this app is built for.

6 years ago, it was clearly built for bloggers. The form factor of a blog is too long, resulting in tl;dr syndromes. Twitter wasn’t a major force, and yet bloggers wanted to have a quick way to engage their followers, thus the invention of “shouting” on one’s blog. Whether you call it ShoutBox, ShoutMix, Shout! whatever, the time has passed. Twitter/Facebook widgets are now the primary way for people to “shout” on blog sites. Go figure why (hint: it starts with s).

However, that doesn’t mean the product is over. There are certain niches that want to have such a product. Companies in particular want to be in charge of the conversation with their potential customers. The Live Chat industry is well and alive, whether it’s backed by an offshore Call Center in Asia, or a one man show like this blog.

The ability for a product to identify who are the customers and then articulate exactly how the customer will use that app is extremely crucial. For example, spam protection is just a feature – what is it for? – if it’s positioned for lead generation tool then it’s to ensure that you only see quality leads from real human beings; if it’s positioned as an exclusive social network tool on websites then it’s to protect the exclusivity by keeping quality of content high. Even if it’s still positioned for the original group of bloggers – the value proposition should be less time spent managing spam and more time blogging.

Know your customers
Even though on the algorithms level we treat customers like numbers and objects, we need to spend more time speaking to customers and understanding what they need, instead of just coding our lives out.

According to the letter, only 0.07% of the 250,000 accounts ShoutMix was able to amass have are paying. That makes 175 customers that one has to know inside out. Call them out, have a coffee and ask what they do, how they utilise the widget to engage their customers, increase sales, provide support or whatever they do. Profile them, create heros so that other bloggers or companies can emulate what they do. Create a community to give each other ideas. All these are only the textbook stuff you can do – just thinking slightly out of the box and I’m sure there’re even more opportunities for these 175 companies or individuals to give you insights you never had.

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End of rant. *yawn* More coding nights ahead. Or maybe I should just shut down the blog…?