The long haul comes at a short-term cost..

Think long term in your business when an improvement initially brings a difficult result. In March 2011, I was working on making Amino easier to use, but it cost page views in the short term.

Think long term in your business, including the details

We fixed little things in the forum. Something previously requiring two clicks might be done in one. Pages became simpler, and strange little problems were removed.

Users didn’t necessarily notice each change. But I wanted using Amino to feel faster, easier and clearer overall.

Fewer clicks meant fewer banner spaces

Much of the income came from banners back then. So there was a conflict: Making something easier and removing unnecessary clicks could reduce page views.

I explained that the work had cost both money and lots of time while we were showing fewer pages. That was frustrating because it affected opportunities to sell advertising.

I compared it with sites splitting an article into many parts to gain more views. My view was that this could harm the user experience.

My hope was that users would return

I expected a better experience could bring more people back, get them to recommend Amino and explore more content. That was the hope behind the investment, not a result I’d already measured.

My point was to consider the long term and avoid panicking over a short-term decline if you still had good reasons to believe in the change.

I also said you needed to be able to afford it. That was my experience and expectations in 2011, not a guarantee that every improvement pays off later.

Think long term in your business when the improvement costs you now

I’d been a little absent from the videos because I was extremely focused on a project I found enormously fun: Improving the entrepreneur forum itself on Amino. It prompted me to talk about how sometimes things hurt before they help.

I compared it with a car that runs but creaks a little, has a light that doesn’t work properly and paintwork that doesn’t shine quite perfectly. Those were the kinds of details I was working on at Amino. Not a whole new product, but lots of small improvements to what was already there.

A great deal had happened over the previous month. Even so, I wouldn’t be surprised if users hadn’t noticed. When clicking no longer makes something strange happen, you rarely think about the strange thing being gone.

Something previously requiring two mouse clicks could now be done with one. The front page might appear a little faster. We removed little things that weren’t relevant or didn’t help users much. The goal was to make it faster, easier and clearer, even if the changes came in tiny steps.

We lived off banners, and now we were showing fewer pages

Much of Amino’s business back then was displaying banners for customers who bought advertising. The more banners we could display, the more we had to sell. I said we were almost constantly sold out, so creating more spaces mattered.

That income had to pay for six employees, servers, bandwidth, freelancers and everything else that kept Amino running. So page views weren’t just a figure I could ignore.

I estimated the work had cost almost 100,000 kroner in freelance fees. On top of that were oceans of my own and others’ time. Including that, my estimate was perhaps 200,000 kroner in total.

And what had we got from it? Around 10,000 fewer page views a day, I said. We’d made things easier and thereby removed some clicks that otherwise gave us pages to display ads on.

"Martin, you’re an idiot"

I said that was also partly my CEO’s reaction: Why spend 100,000–200,000 kroner on something that reduced our revenue potential by around ten per cent? I understood the objection. In the short term, it was bloody frustrating.

I compared it with newspapers splitting an article across three, four, five or sometimes ten pages, even though it could fit on one or two. In my view, they did it to gain more page views and advertising income right now.

I described it as peeing your pants to keep warm. They weren’t necessarily trying to annoy users, of course, but choosing more page views despite making reading awkward could, I thought, indicate desperation, poor planning or a bad strategy.

My hope was more visits and recommendations

I believed our improvements could bring a different development over the following months. Perhaps someone visiting once a week would start coming twice because the experience was better: Pages loaded faster, there were fewer errors and less clutter, and you got answers to your questions.

I also hoped people would recommend Amino. After a good experience, they could tell others it was fast, things worked and they found the help they needed.

And perhaps someone who’d only come to look at one thing would want to explore more. With a nicer site to use, there could be a reason to stay longer and ask a new question.

What I wanted was more unique users and more visits. Then the page views we’d lost by removing awkward steps could return through more genuine use of Amino.

It was an expectation, not a finished result

In the video, I imagined that perhaps six months later I could report gaining 50,000–100,000 page views instead of losing 10,000 a day. That was my hope and future scenario in March 2011, not a result we’d already achieved.

My encouragement was to think long term if you could. Don’t panic just because something new brings short-term challenges. If you believe in the vision and that the change benefits customers, it may be worth taking the loss and swallowing the frustration.

But I also said: If you can afford it. You need to be able to carry the period when the improvement costs money.

Competitors might enjoy some extra business initially. I used a hypothetical example where six months later they could have lost twenty per cent of revenue to you. It was an illustration of winning in the long run, not a promise of a specific figure. That was the thought that kept me working on Amino’s details. You can find more of my experiences of building companies in Iværksætter til jeg dør.

Best wishes, Martin P.S. If you’re an Amino Plus member, try the latest Amino service:

The mention of the new Amino service is from 2011.

http://www.amino.dk/nyt