But, Josh... I'm not interested in healthy competition.
Here's the thing about the "marketing strategy" here: the marketing was the only innovation in these sites, and should have been the focus point. You executed the technical aspects of your service just fine, but that wasn't the important part. There's nothing new about a server-side image rotator. What you "pioneered" was a service that brought the point-and-click programming-free creation of image rotators to the independent marketers in the TE arena, and you absolutely flubbed the presentation.
First, you launched the service without generating any interest in advance. If your launch promotion comprised anything more than an announcement on NMF, I didn't see it. There were no promotion emails, no promotion partners, and initially no special offers. When you did add a one-time offer later, it was a simple 25% discount on the monthly service without so much as a paragraph of ad copy to excite users about the possibilities. You need to generate attention and excite people when you launch a new service. You should have been attracting promo partners in GOB; the regulars here know that if nothing else you're a smart tech guy, and I have a feeling a simple PM to Jon along the lines of, "Hey, Jon -- can I get access to the GOB forum?" would get you a key.
When you announced the service, you were given piles and piles of tips in that thread. Your response to most pieces of advice given in that thread was along the lines of, "Thanks, but I'm not concerned." The funniest part, to me, was that I essentially told you in that thread that losing 20% of displays would be an absolute breaker to many, to the point of encouraging me to launch a competitor service of my own. Your response? Essentially, "It's a feature." When I saw that, I smiled; I started working on Keyring that afternoon.
Learn from your experiences. Take another look at my site from a presentation viewpoint, Josh, but instead of looking for similarities this time, look for differences. Look at the promotion emails being sent out. Look at the special offers members see when they log in. Look at the text, and how it isn't in Times New Roman. Look at how the site tries to attract users to the services instead of just assuming that their minds will be blown into action by the sheer power of the concept.
Look at how I present the image rotators. My promotional materials call them keyrings, reminding the users of how they keep everything in one place for them. But that's not why I call them that; I do it because it encourages other people to do the same. My members are already sending me emails talking about "the keyrings." If things go my way, soon people will see an image rotator and think "keyring."
"Where can I get one of those banner rotators?" "What? Oh, the keyrings! You just go to..." You won't see me claiming I invented this concept, but I'd bet that you'll see people assuming that I did. I didn't pick the name for the service that was my favorite -- I picked the name that I thought would lend itself to the best branding strategy. (If I could rename Magnify, I would do it in a heartbeat.)
You may think your marketing strategy was similar to mine, but I am absolutely positive that if I had marketed my service the way you marketed yours, it wouldn't be selling anywhere near as well as it is. Keyring's first-day sales numbers yesterday were a single-day record for me, and Keyring blew away the first-day numbers of all of my past launches in spite of being the least creative of the three sites I run. Why? Because I've been paying attention to my experiences over the last year or so and taking lessons from the things that have worked and the things that haven't, and I've reached a point where I've learned enough for it to make a serious difference. And I've made mistakes with this one, too -- and you can bet that when you see my next service, I'll have taken advantage of the lessons I learned from those.
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) is better and more useful. Our service lets you sign up free and create "keyrings" -- banner rotators -- that you add your banners to, and then you can advertise all of those banners using a single URL. With our service, free members get 100% of the display impressions when they use their own rotators; premium membership includes as many rotators as the user likes, and additional features such as source-by-source tracking and custom display frequency weighting.
You can also of course promote the service as an affiliate and earn commissions.
