Brian Alvey

A few weeks ago in Beverly Hills, Maker Studios CEO Ynon Kreiz gave a talk on the viability of YouTube businesses and multichannel networks. It’s a fascinating space right now, with no shortage of strong opinions from people like Jason Calacanis, Mark Suster and Jason Calacanis.

Maker’s network is on track to pass 5 billion monthly video views by the end of the year and the Makers video audience reach is second only to YouTube’s own. I know a bunch of executives and investors at Makers. It’s an exciting time for them.

Kreiz talked about off-YouTube monetization strategies, branded videos and building out sales and engineering teams. The article pointed out that platforms like these “can only succeed to the extent that they enable creators to more effectively engage with their audiences.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Continue reading “Audience engagement”

A few weeks ago, I saw Willie Nelson at the Capital Theater in Port Chester, NY. It’s a great place to see a show and I’m a huge Willie Nelson fan. It was a great show.

I sat right across the aisle from Mary-Kate Olsen and her boyfriend Olivier Sarkozy. It’s pretty wild because my kids watched a Full House marathon during a vacation earlier this year. Now when it’s time to pick a show for the family to watch, one of them always picks Full House. I never watched it the first time around, but I’ve now seen more than a dozen episodes. It’s a trip.

Continue reading “Mary-Kate Olsen and Uncle Jesse”

I’m in SF for the LAUNCH Mobile conference and my hotel is just a block away from the Automattic office, the headquarters of WordPress. I visited the old WordPress HQ at The Embarcadero on the waterfront the day after I pitched Crowd Fusion at TechCrunch 50 back in 2009, but they had to give that space up. I’d heard it was being condemned. The new HQ is great.

Everyone at WordPress works from home, just like we did at Weblogs, Inc. and Crowd Fusion. I love running virtual teams, distributed workforces. It lets you hire for talent and passion — not location. This weekend the whole Automattic team was in town for some kind of company meetup — working together for a few days in SF, then taking buses to Santa Cruz for outdoor activities which they said may or may not include typing.

It was great to see Chris Finke, who figured out I was only a block away and invited me to crash their party. Matt Mullenweg and one of his designers showed me some amazing new CMS interfaces that they’re working on and I got to show them a mini demo of Ceros.

And then I saw Nick Bradbury. I don’t think he realizes it, even when I tell him to his face, but he’s one of my tech heroes. We met briefly back in 2004 at SxSW, the same event where I first met Matt.

Continue reading “If Nick Bradbury can work from home, so can I.”

My wife’s cousin Alexis gave me Michael Bublé’s first CD about a decade ago. Mixed in with traditional standards it had songs like Moondance and Crazy Little Thing Called Love done big band style. I loved it!

But his original songs are even better. Haven’t Met You Yet and Hollywood were two of the highlights from Z100’s 2010 Jingle Ball.

His recent song, It’s a Beautiful Day, sounds like an upbeat love song that you might play at a wedding, but it’s not. He’s singing to a girl who dumped him, telling her that it was the best thing that ever happened to him.

He’s glad that she’s the one who got away.

It’s a breakup anthem.

Continue reading “It’s a Beautiful Day”

Two weeks ago, my wife made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. She suggested I watch The Godfather.

For most of you that wouldn’t be worthy of a blog post. But I’m 43 years old and I had never seen The Godfather. And it’s not just that movie. Most of the biggest movies ever have eluded me.

When I worked with Jeffrey Zeldman, he would quote some famous line like “We’ll always have Paris” and I would reply “That’s from a movie, right?” It drove him nuts. We are talking about movies like Casablanca, Raging Bull, Citizen Kane, Psycho, Taxi Driver, Reservoir Dogs and The Maltese Falcon.

Of course I know plenty of lines from those movies. I’ve just never gotten around to watching them.

Continue reading “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

When a big freight train is standing still, even a small block of wood in front of it’s wheel will keep it from moving forward. Once it gets some speed though, that same train can be very hard to stop.

I’ve always struggled with this. It is way easier to make incremental changes — even large changes — to an old project than to do work on something that has barely started.

I pointed this effect out on a call with a friend of mine recently. He had joined someone else’s dev team long after the product’s foundation was built and all of the rules were laid down. There are pros and cons to his situation. On the plus side, it is way easier to iterate 10% on an established codebase. But the psychological downside is that he often feels like he’s been hired to write the missing chapters of a famous dead author’s final book. He doesn’t really own it.

It was refreshing to compare his situation to my own since my next startup’s train hasn’t even pulled out of the station yet. I’m not worried. Soon I will have momentum.

It’s crazy. I’ve told people this for years:

If you build something for everyone, it works for no one.

Fully aware of my own good advice, I still dreamed up something that was too broad. Crowd Fusion was an unproductized platform that could do anything the web could do, while Ceros is a laser-focused SaaS design platform.

I remember completely losing some of my favorite VCs in a meeting once. I was showing how we’d gone from 5 to 35 people and tripled our revenue from the year before. They asked who was doing sales. I was proud that so far it had been just me using my reputation in publishing technology to land famous media customers. They saw that I was planning to spend the money we would raise on developers and a support team, not on salespeople. They were done listening to me. They were looking for a Salesforce pipeline filled with deals, not a lunatic who tracked potential customers in Excel or task management software.

One big difference between Crowd Fusion and Ceros is that we could never build a proper product sales team for Crowd Fusion. Crowd Fusion could have had a solutions sales team, like an agency, but I resisted building one because I didn’t want us to be an agency.

Continue reading “If you build something for everyone, it works for no one.”

I had lunch with a friend a few weeks ago. He’s running his third startup. The first I’ve never heard of, the second one had potential but didn’t make it and his third is on the cusp of sustainability. He told me that this one has to work, because the hours are a strain on his marriage.

I thought about that for a few minutes.

Four years ago this week I pitched Crowd Fusion on stage at TechCrunch 50. One of my judges was Reid Hoffman and he didn’t believe Crowd Fusion could be the “last CMS you’ll ever need” and that I’d be working on Crowd Fusion for the next ten or twenty years.

“Echoing what Dick Costolo said earlier, I think getting people to adopt a complex productivity tool will have a slow curve. In technology you are never the last anything. There are always new content types. Now I think what you’re doing is exactly the right thing: plugin architecture, open source. Trying to create a constant rejuvenation and evolution is exactly the right strategy. But in tech, there seem to be entire revolutions every two to three years.”

In technology you are never the last anything.

Continue reading “Because you can’t, you won’t and you don’t stop.”

My favorite songs from Carousel are If I Loved You, which we used to sing a lot when I was a kid, and Soliloquy, where Billy Bigelow realizes that his child might be a girl and freaks out because he doesn’t know how to be a father to a girl.

June is Bustin’ Out All Over is a good song, but not as great as those two.

Plus it’s September. And it’s getting colder now. And what was I talking about?

Carousels. Right.

Brands can use Ceros to make embeddable carousels now. And there’s more Internet Explorer support, like 100% support for IE 10. And designers can replace images in the canvas without needing to re-upload and re-position them. And there’s more analytics control including the ability to embed other services like Google Analytics or Omniture.

It’s the fastest moving product team I’ve ever worked with.

Check out release 5.9.

Your marketing department will thank you.