Clipisode is shutting down

Clipisode was a ridiculously easy way for brands and stars to get videos from anyone, anywhere. It worked simply by sharing a link. No one had to download, install or join anything to send you a video reply. Clipisode even worked inside apps like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and Instagram. You could go from idea to collecting videos in just a few minutes.

Clipisode began as an app for iPhone and Android that let you combine an unlimited number of video clips sent in by other people. But long videos with 20 replies from random fans weren’t very watchable, so we made a new app called Answers RN that was designed for doing quick AMAs where you shared out each fan video combined with your reply. Those apps got thousands of users, but they didn’t set the world on fire. Plus the brands and agencies that were paying us really needed a big web dashboard to manage hundreds of video replies, not an app. So in 2020, we released our brand manager.

When a Clipisode campaign worked, there was nothing like it. Our demos felt like a magic trick. Someone who had worked with mobile developers at both Snapchat and Apple dove across the conference table mid-demo, shook my hand and said, “I didn’t know phones could do what you just showed me!” Ogilvy’s head of digital said the project we did with them was the best performing UGC campaign he has seen in his career.

It was a wild ride, propelled by videos from stars and creators like Brad Paisley, Peyton Manning, Greg Cipes, Colleen Ballinger, Miranda Sings, Brian Posehn, Steve Burton, Bradford Anderson, Pete Wentz, Kira Kosarin, Kevin Frazier, Chris Melberger, Chris Pratt, the Property Brothers, Sylvia Brindis, Kevin Bachelder, Clare Mackintosh, Paul Secor, Sarah Moran, Aderson Oliveira, Mod Sun, Lil Nas X — and their fans.

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The most popular software for writing fiction isn’t Word. It’s Excel.

I wrote that in 2011 and it got a bunch of attention. Then every few years someone with a lot of followers would discover it and retweet it and it would get a bunch more attention.

I’ve seen it quoted a bunch, sometimes attributed to “anonymous” but usually tweeted without attribution or rewritten as “More fiction is written in Excel than Word.” I see those because people often tag me in the thread. One guy tweeted it 6 years later and got 8,000 retweets and 25,000 likes.

It’s a good thing I don’t tweet for a living.

I’ve seen it in startup pitch decks. One investor has used it in three posts on his fund’s blog and he always shares it with, “Someone once quipped…” Every single time. And he knows me.

That tweet will be on my tombstone unless I come up with something better.

Wish me luck!

The death of Sonos has been delayed

UPDATE: Sonos CEO Patrick Spence sent customers a great reassuring email today. They won’t be bricking older devices and they will make sure mixed networks with old and new devices work. Like I said before, I’m optimistic. I love Sonos.

I have loved Sonos for years. They were one of our advertisers when my friends and I owned Engadget, but I was tens of thousands of dollars in debt working on my first big startup and I couldn’t afford their magical “music for every room” smart speakers. By the time we sold our company, the prices had come way down. How ironic. I could finally afford their fancy gear and now it didn’t cost as much.

Today we have them in every room: a big Playbar on our living room TV, two Play:5s, two Play:3s, a Sonos One in every kid’s room and a Connect:Amp bridge that lets us play music on our backyard speakers. From our phones we can play anything we want anywhere in our house. Our family bounces between Spotify, SiriusXM, Pandora, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, iHeartRadio, podcasts and local radio stations.

Sonos is magical. Their customers rave about them to anyone who’ll listen, the same way people rave about Air Pods, Tesla, In-N-Out, Instant Pot and DisneyWorld.

And right now, they’re screwed.

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I’m buying the Foo Fighters

Gary Vaynerchuk is known for many things. One of them is that he wants to buy the Jets. He often explains that he doesn’t expect to buy them and probably wouldn’t be happy as an NFL owner. But setting a goal of buying the Jets drives him.

So I picked a similar goal:

Gary kindly replied:

The Jets aren’t for sale. The Foo Fighters certainly aren’t for sale. And we don’t know what we’d do with them if we owned them. But man it’s going to be fun trying.

Finally, WordPress

I built dozens of content management systems that generated millions of dollars in value.

Matt Mullenweg built one content management system, gave it away for free, became a leader in the open source revolution and generated more than a billion dollars in value.

Maybe I was charging too much!

Since 2003, I have run my blog on software I created. A decade ago, I was using Blogsmith, which still powers Engadget and Autoblog and ultimately became the platform AOL.com runs on. Last year, I was using Crowd Fusion, which still powers TMZ and Ellen‘s websites and was used for high-profile projects at Best Buy, MySpace, Warner Bros and News Corp.

Now, my blog runs on WordPress.

I don’t have time to tinker with old, unsupported PHP code. All I care about these days is helping brands, agencies, influencers and creators of all kinds make amazing social videos with my app Clipisode.

All of the custom things I needed to do with my site can by done on WordPress. And not just the WordPress that you can download and customize. It can all be done on WordPress.com. That wasn’t always the case. Now it is.

This feels right.