Firstly anyone commenting on this post should also take a look at the current article on "HelpSpot’s First 6 Months of Sales" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199688 to get an idea of real numbers.

"Replicating that experience on-line is difficult. Tipjoy is notably lacking in that regard. The main page is made up of a bunch of (dry) statistics. Hello, this isn’t Microsoft Excel! What are they trying to sell—business analytics?? Where’s the sidebar advertising how your Tipjoy data can be added to your Facebook/Myspace site? Where’s the banner that says “Show your girlfriend you really like her latest Facebook post?”... it must market itself as a social service. It must integrate into life, or life will continue to pass by outside of it. ..."

Spot on comment. Require tools, samples and blog articles to do this. Make this task, easier than the best examples you find.

"... Lesson: To succeed in Web 2.0 your site can not be an optional layer added to people’s lives. It must be inserted directly into the lives of the consumer ..."

The author gets to what I think is a problem for most web businesses.

"... And one last thing. No credit cards? Hey dudes, it’s 2008, Web 2.0. Instead of “Coming Soon” it should say “transaction charge”. Leave the choice to the consumer. ..."

Author doesn't know what he's talking about here. Anything to do with money, transactions requires cash and likely regulation. One startup I worked for had to fork over $USD250K and deal with unsavoury characters in Vegas to do such credit processing back in '96. (how did Viaweb deal with this?) It's not Tipjoy does not want to do this. They simply cannot due to constraints. The legislation for taking money (Money Transfer Service under Patriot Act ~ http://tipjoy.com/faq/#q8 ) has a lot of hurdles. But maybe this is one message Tipjoy has to repeat over and over again until they find another way around it.

Chicken and egg problem?

But Tipjoy has another hurdle the author didn't cover. Something Tipjoy yet to exploit ... great places to Tip.

To get more users Tipjoy has to overcome many hurdles:

- get more blog users that want to be tipped.

- then get them to install Tipjoy.

Only then can readers tip. This is a real problem. How do you solve this? I've heard and read of many Startups and the techniques they used to convince people to use their product and service. Take flickr for example. Want to convert viewers to users? Well firstly they had to find the site, view photos. Conversion? All it takes is one user to either discover a photo, email a friend to take a look. They like it and sign up. Then they get some friends to take a look. Maybe there is a chance one of these people take up flickr. It helped Catrina,George blogged each day highlighting the new features ~ http://blog.flickr.net/en/2004/12/page/2/ then went and greeted users as they signed up. It has resulted in a strong viewer, user community.

Compare this with Tipjoy. To become a user you have to have a blog and install it. To make it worthwhile, third parties have to tip. The problem is the service is for blog owners and grateful readers. So acquiring new users is difficult. I wonder if Tipjoy considered this problem from other angles? One potential solution could be to create a list of top blogs to read, try to get these owners signed up with Tipjoy. The information both blog owners could get back (who read what when) might be useful? I can think of a lot of other strategies that focus just as much on the potential viewer who tips. The ability to find more readable sites might be useful to readers who want to discover new content. Who knows they might even tip?

Joel wrote clearly about strategy and highlighted the problems platform creators face when trying to build this type of ecosystem ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html (read the bit about Microsoft, finance and money) I wonder if Tipjoy could benefit from tweaking their approach slightly to attack this problem head-on?