If Mahalo has been such a loved product with versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 why are they basically scrapping all of it and releasing a new product?
It must be hilarious being an investor and seeing entrepreneurs pitch so confidently with ideas and then the next week see them something almost entirely different and totally confident in that.
keep in mind that Flickr, Groupon, Nintendo and Nokia are all pivots. Your first idea is rarely your best, and pivoting is what great entrepreneurs do while B-level entrepreneurs run their companies into the ground.
Now, factually you're a little off... so please let me get you up to speed:
1. We've been doing articles and Q&A for 3 and 2 years--so that's not being scrapped.
2. A year ago we stopped pursuing human-powered search since it wasn't growing
3. We examined what was working and it was helping people learn--so we branded the company today "learn anything." This is a great big mission and it will make us a top 50 site in the next 2-3 years.
We currently have 105 team members and are adding 100--and we hit profitability in 2010. We are the 160th largest site in the United States not counting our YouTube traffic (1M+ views per day). If you added that together we would be top 100 today in fact.
In fact, I just left a meeting with one of our investors and they are thrilled with the fact that they invested in Mahalo and that we tried hard to make human-powered search work. They love the fact that we iterated on our idea. So much so they asked if we would take MORE of their money.
You must be a young entrepreneur, because success in life is not about confidence--it's about humility and the ability to try things.
"If you remove the video revenue sharing scheme from Mahalo 4, you’re left with a ballooning group of in-house staff members that are creating content. Mahalo version 1 started exactly the same way. Large groups of people were hired in-house to generate written articles and cull popular hyperlinks. Shortly thereafter, Mahalo 2 relied on offshore outsourcing and then inexpensive remote American labor to mill content.
When thought of in this light with a view of Mahalo’s history, it starts to become clear that Mahalo 4 is an iteration that has already occurred. Mahalo is iterating over itself. Partly due to the fact that they have enough money to do so, partly because the revolving door of staff members hasn’t experienced previous iterations and partly because online video is simply making money for content companies at the moment."
Incorrect, but I wouldn't expect you to understand the complexity of the business without being inside it.
1. We had inhouse people, people at home and people working in Manila (on data, like fast facts--not full- on writing) of articles and that worked well. In fact, you can almost make the at home and in the office model work if you keep the costs down to $10 an hour/$10 a page. To have folks in the office you would have to do it as $400-500 a week and no benefits and no chef (which kind of sucks), so work from home wins this model (as it did on Demand Media, Weblogs Inc, etc).
2. Mahalo is 40 months old now, which means we have better SEO, better ability to move folks around the site and a better ability to know which pages make money and don't. So, we can make 3x as much now per page as we did back then (or more). So, we've learned a lot.
3. Video is VERY different than writing articles. I won't get into the metrics, but you can't compare it to articles. also, the traffic to each is very different.
So, Mahalo will continue to grow and folks will continue to misunderstand how it works... and that's just fine. We're not here to explain how to run a business to folks who don't know how to. We're here to build an amazing place where people can "learn anything" and to get a return for our investors.
We are the 160th largest site in the USA now.... and if you counted our video traffic to our domain traffic we would be in the top 100 (maybe #75). Quantcast doesn't do this (grrrrr).
Next year we will be in the top 100, then top 50 and then in the top 25.
at that point you'll write a long post and explain to me how i don't know what I'm doing, and i will write a long post back to you explaining how business works..... again! :-)
It must be hilarious being an investor and seeing entrepreneurs pitch so confidently with ideas and then the next week see them something almost entirely different and totally confident in that.
Oh right if you pivot it's okay.