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Justin and Jason discuss incorporating an an S-corporation to reduce tax liability, whether Justin is a Whig or a Tory, how any system of rules can be gamed, the status of the TweetMiner PR campaign, how MashAPI is invading Justin’s brain, scatching your own itch vs searching for product/market fit, dealing with Internet negativity, getting to know Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh, Jason’s refusal to write porn-ware and whether Justin should go to an upcoming Twitter developer’s conference.
I never went to those Bar Camp thingys either. I could tell it was a bunch of fluff. However, Techzing made me 30% more technical.
Regarding S-corp, do it. Fuck the government any way you can. They’d do the same to you (that’s why you have employment taxes.) Also, corporations are a great way to build a retirement plan.
Justin: STICK TO TWEETMINER ZOMG! PR is a marathon, not a sprint. To make $50K/month for TweetMiner, you need 2000 paying customers at the high price level. Is that really impossible? Probably not. I think you should re-target for enterprise and small business. Fortune 5 million and all that. You’d have multiple users per business, guaranteed. You may need to support more social networks (getting into territory with which I’m not familiar) but I think it is impossible NOT to find 2000 paying customers.
That Bopinder sounds like a champ! As for where the name actually came from, I used to make fun of my friend’s name and this was the name I used for him. In case people are interested, here is the Google Analytics revenue chart: http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/3266/picture33k.png looks like it dipped in November.
STARTUPS AND ALIENS.
Just remembered: in November, there was a serious bug in the installer causing crashes. Haha.
@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh How do you get reveneu into Google Analytics?
Justin, your payment processor usually has some way to integrate it.
Hey Justin,
Here’s my 2 cents about what you should do with tweetminer.
Do you have advertising and PR professionals subscribing to TweetMiner ? Or is it mostly individuals who are doing their own PR / tweeting ?
Because, if you have a premium subscription that was aimed at professionals that are doing marketing / PR for other businesses you could charge a lot more.
I mean imagine some multi-million dollar company is paying a large PR company to manage their ‘online presence’, would the PR company be able to bill them $50 a month or $100 a month or $150 a month for the use of a Twitter Scheduler ? You bet.
When selling this premier subscription to PR companies you have the advantage that the person making the purchase isn’t using their own money.
I would offer PR / Marketing professionals a 30% discount on a Premier TweetMiner subscription of $120 a month. So they have added value to pass on to their clients,
“Obviously if we get your account we would be using Facebook, twitter blah blah.. and usually you would be paying around $120 a month for a professional twitter scheduler, we can get that for you for a %30 discount”.
(or if the PR professionals prefer they can charge their clients whatever they want for monthly access to tweetminer, they might want to charge a premium for their tweetminer admin time, so they might be billing their clients $200 a month for TweetMiner access. You aren’t offering a commission you are offering discounted pricing, there is a big difference.)
You are giving them an opportunity to give more value to their clients.
Ok, so if you are going to do this you will need to identify some (possibly very small) new features that the premier subscription will offer that the others wont.
But the number #1 task is to find out how to break into this market, how to get in contact with PR / Marketing agencies. Well email some and explain what you are trying to do and ask for feedback. Then develop a deck and visit some in person.
Find the big agencies that are already using Twitter. Be prepared to explain why TweetMiner is better than the other options.
Could you be making big money from tweetminer ? I bet you could.
Cheers
Sam H
It seems there are a lot of job adverts on Twitter.
Which seems spammy to me, except for the fact that it’s not really spam on twitter because only people who want to see them see them
(I guess they are spammy in the search results, but Twitter themselves could solve that).
Could TweetMiner integrate with some popular software for Recruitment agencies ? A recruitment agency that is trying to get more people to look at their job ads would pay a significant amount a month for a tool that helps.
You could give tweetminer for free to a recruitment agency in exchange for making a case study of them, write up how they used tweetminer to make their tweet stream more relevant to job seekers. Then send that case study, with a discount offer to hundreds of other recruitment agencies.
Justin,
Another 2 cents from me 🙂
Who has the most twitter followers in relation to “corporate communications” ? Could it be you ?
Find someone who works for the government or a large company doing “communications”, meaning they write brochures, booklets, manage ad campaigns etc. Someone who wants to make a name for themselves in their profession. Offer them free tweetminer and help to get going. Then ask if every so often they could mention on twitter that they use TweetMiner.
In fact, you could offer complementary tweetminer to government communications officers.
“The TweetMiner Stimulus – Less TARP More Tweet”. (or at least the first 100 to contact you).
With regard to the previous suggestion of targeting professionals who service organisations rather than individuals / small organisations, how great could it feel the first time someone subscribes for $100 a month ? That would put a smile on your face.
Cheers
Sam
Name ideas
– make sure the podcast name is the same as the domain (techzing vs techzinglive)
– JJ Tech
– Techula
– Tech For Two
– A Cup of Tech
– Compile and Build
– Syntax Error
@Samh Awsome post. Thanks so much. I will be taking on board what you said and having a good hard think about it 🙂
Nice show. I especially enjoyed the “off the rails” part about politics and the part where Jason tells about his buddies – porn peddlers and such which got me thinking about potential to get referrals from Jason or Justin for good freelance consultants for web development. Say, if I were to be looking for a consultant would you be able and willing to recommend somebody?
Woohoo Mash API! Forget the dev’s, they just get in the way, make an intuitive language that a business domain expert can master and you’ll rule the universe!