MADE IN DETROIT

Why do startups insist on sending mail from a “no-reply” email address?

I’ve sent a lot of email (first at the admissions office at UChicago, next on the Automated Email team at Amazon, and now at AppStoreHQ) and the only time I think it was justified was in Amazon’s marketing mail. Their volume is so large that it’d be very, very difficult to sift through the noise.

For everyone else, though, I see no reason for no-reply email addresses. Make it easy for your users and customers to contact you, especially after you’ve just reached out to them. Allow — even invite — them to respond to your message with a simple click of Reply.

I know you don’t want to have to deal with the bounces (you should really be handling these anyways) and the Out of Offices, but those are so easy to ignore with a couple filters.

If you want to provide the absolute best possible customer experience, email is a great place to start. Make it easy to do so.

Fresh off his awesome 91st minute goal in the World Cup after another disallowed goal, Landon Donovan said to the ESPN reporter, “This team embodies what the American spirit is about. We had a goal disallowed the other night, We had another good goal disallowed tonight. But we just keep going. And I think that’s what people admire so much about Americans. And I’m damn proud.” Indeed, that is The American Spirit.

When I was young, I played a lot of soccer. I was decent (admittedly, the older I get, the better I was) and had the opportunity to play all across the country and the world. When I was 11 or 12 years old, I went on my first overseas soccer trip. A team of Americans — coached by a Dutch living in the US — spent two weeks in Holland playing mid-level youth teams (not the Ajax’s, but not bad teams either). Looking back on it, this trip taught me a lot about the US and The American Spirit. 

One story in particular taught me a lot about America and what it really means to be American. It goes like this:

It was our first game, and we’re all very excited to be playing. So are the Dutch, our opponents. Unfortunately, the Dutch seemed to be more well-prepared for the game, as they took an early lead about 10 minutes into the game. 

As they scored, my dad audibly groaned. Our coach heard him, turned, and replied “what are you upset about? Now we’re going to win 5-1.” He continued, “Watch. Our boys will get each other up for the game now, and it’ll be 1-1 within a few minutes. It’s just the way American kids work.”

Sure enough, we started rallying each other to get back in the game and just like that, it was 1-1. 

Then our coach turned to my dad and said, “Now watch, the Dutch will be deflated, the Americans will smell blood, and it’s all over.” Within a few minutes, it was 2-1 and the final score ended up exceeding our coach’s prediction at 6-1.

This type of story continued the entire trip. Games that were close — even scoreless — until the last 10 minutes or so would end up being won 4-0 by our team because we never gave up and once we saw an opening, we pounced.

The American Spirit is something really special. Never giving up and competing at 110% until the absolute final moment is what we’re all about, in sport and in life. Our team taught me this first-hand when I was young. Landon Donovan and the rest of Team USA re-taught me this today.

I just made a large comment on Hacker News, in response to a post by Eric Meyer about App shopping and the potential for mobile web apps. I thought the comment warranted it’s own post as a quick case study in selling a mobile web app, so here it is.

In his post, Eric writes:

Except that’s only true because until now, nobody has launched an alternate store that offers web stack applications (WSAs). Maybe that’s because nobody is really building WSAs yet, at least not in numbers large enough to justify building a store to sell them. But then, maybe developers aren’t building WSAs because there’s no central place to sell them. The centralization of stores is at least as attractive to sellers as to shoppers.

We’ve done a poor job of raising awareness about this (I promise we’re trying to do better), but we’ve been quietly testing out using our store, AppStoreHQ, as a mobile web app store (what Eric calls WSAs). We also promote native iPhone and Android apps. I could go on and on about what we’re doing, why it’s cool, and how it helps developers, but Eric does a relatively good job of explaining that.

Instead, I’ll just give you a tidbit of information about how we’re _actually_ seeing this work in the wild: In short, it works. I developed — as the first test app available for purchase on our mobile web app platform — an app I named fortysquires. Fortysquires is just an HTML5 frontend to foursquare’s API. I open sourced it so developers could see just how simple it is to integrate with us.

What’s amazing about fortysquires is that I really didn’t expect to sell more than a few copies. It was built just to be a reference app. Remember, this is a paid ($0.99) app that competes against free, better-featured native apps for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry. There’s also a mobile web version of foursquare (but it’s not HTML5 and doesn’t include geolocation, etc, like fortysquires does). I really thought I’d sell maybe two or three copies to developers looking to test out the workflow.

Yet, what I’m seeing is that real users are purchasing this app, everyday. Everyday, I sell at least one — but typically more like 3-4 — “copies” of the app. It’s not a gold mine, of course, but it far surpasses my expectations.

These are users from all over the world on all sorts of different devices. iPhone usage is >50%, but Android is close to 20%, and Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Samsung all make the cut. And 50% of visitors are from the US, 25% from western Europe, and the rest is divided between many, many countries like Canada, Australia, Israel, Russia, many Asian countries, Costa Rica, Maldives, Camaroon, Kyrgyzstan, etc. In all, more than 70 different countries have checked out fortysquires!

We have a lot of work to be done to build a great platform for mobile web app developers to sell their apps (read: we need to make distribution even better for developers, and the purchasing workflow even more frictionless for users, among many other things), but I think we’re well on our way to doing so. Mobile web apps may never compete head-to-head with native apps in certain categories (Games), but I think we’re proving that they can compete — and even win — when the ability to discover and purchase the apps is easy and the apps are great.