Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 7)

Joe Speiser: We spend a lot of time looking at, “How can we engage the user? What kind of content can we show them to keep them interested?” What does that [time spent] look like? Is it one minute, two minutes, or three minutes? What’s that number? Right now, we’re up to 3 minutes and 30 seconds, which we think is pretty great. Because of that, Facebook treats us well. They show our content more because the readers on Facebook enjoy it. It’s not just time on site. It’s also how many times is the post being shared, liked, or commented on.

Facebook also looks at the negatives. They follow and watch very closely how many times someone unfollows a post. If you hit a certain threshold there, Facebook will take action against your page – not manual, but automatic. They’re going to demote it in the news feed moving forward. That has negative points against your fan page. You accrue enough of those and your page gets buried.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a corollary to what you’re saying? Let’s say you have a fan page and you have a main site blog, which is very good content. Do you then recommend that, on the fan page, to promote some really good content on a paid promo basis to up the algorithm uptick?

Joe Speiser: We haven’t found that paying is going to make a difference on your organic fan page. I don’t know if you can buy your way out of it. I think you have to put forth good content organically and let the algorithm do its thing. There are people out there who destroy their pages by putting a bunch of offers of sweepstakes on their page. Facebook takes notice and buries you. It’s not that you can’t get it back. You have to produce good content.

Sramana Mitra: This is an interesting discussion. It sounds like you’ve gone back to your digital media roots and you’re letting somebody else run the e-commerce business. Is that an accurate observation?

Joe Speiser: That’s very accurate. You have to know your limitations and understand what you’re good at and what you need help with. Something that we’ve always done here is hire people that complement you and help you in areas that you’re weak in. I don’t think I was strong enough on the commerce side to be able to scale from $50 million to $100 million. My passion has always been on the media side. Once we spun this off, to me it was natural. There was no way I was going to stay with commerce when I can go media. I enjoy this so much more.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the media business, revenue-wise?

Joe Speiser: I like to think that it’s fairly large in terms of the competition. We haven’t gone public with the revenue figures yet.

Sramana Mitra: Is this self-financed? What’s the structure of the media business?

Joe Speiser: Because the media business spun out of PetFlow, it’s still part of PetFlow. It still shares the same parent. While we haven’t taken any money for this business, PetFlow took money for PetFlow.

Sramana Mitra: You’re basically a division of PetFlow at this point. You’re just developing the media business.

Joe Speiser: Right.

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations! It looks like you’re having fun.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things
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