

What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call - gplloyd
http://blog.mixlr.com/2013/11/what-happens-when-the-president-barack-obama-uses-your-startup-for-a-conference-call/?

======
mcenedella
I disagree with this point, which is not supported by the facts:

"The press are now all over the OFA team and criticising their ability to
procure technical solutions or web services (rightly or wrongly). But in this
case, obviously we’re a third party service provider so this really has
nothing to do with the President’s team’s ability to execute."

It is indeed a reflection of the President's team's ability to execute when
they reach out to a vendor on a Friday for a Monday call, mangle the details
so that the vendor and the audience have mis-set expectations, and, most
importantly, did not do testing to determine whether or not their event will
reflect well on their boss and organization.

They've done these calls before - for example, after the State of the Union:
[http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/02/obama-doing-
ofa-c...](http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/02/obama-doing-ofa-call-
after-state-of-the-union-156672.html) \-- so dropping this order in the lap of
a new vendor with 72 hours to go almost guarantees that some mistake will
happen.

I understand this is OFA, not the White House, and perhaps for a seat-of-the-
pants campaign style event under normal circumstances, this would be
excusable.

But these are not normal circumstances.

When your boss is under fire for his rollout of the most important government
tech program since the Moon landing, and you arrange a call to discuss that
rollout, it is imperative that you make sure the technology works. Guaranteed.
No questions asked.

If you can't guarantee that, then don't use that vendor, don't do the event as
a conference call, or don't do the event.

Why? The resulting PR mess, which might not be germane to a start-up tech
audience, but is very germane to the Office of The President, will come and
will be costly.

The post serves to reinforce the image of a management team around the
President that does not understand that making very urgent requests of
technologists does not mean that the technology will automatically obey.

------
jmilloy
I think Greg is too close to the events: I still mostly don't know what
happened when Obama used Mixlr. Can anyone help out? Some specific questions:

>Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” ...
which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for

Okay, so what _is_ Mixlr for? I poked around and found out briefly, but I'm
still curious what Mixlr allows that they didn't use and could have. What did
you mean by "nor to the extent of what Mixlr allows"?

>This led to some pretty mis-set expectations and disappointed users which
wasn’t a great tone to recover from.

How do you know users were disappointed? Do you have any data, or at least
anecdotes, that you could show? Do users rate their experience, for example?
How did you recover? And how did you decide that you recovered already?

>Even 10 trolls are a lot louder than 30,000 supporters

What actually happened? What features enabled a few people to effect the
experience of the other listeners?

>Note to self... disable comments

I gather that disabling comments is not a feature available to the
broadcaster? Maybe it should be; are you considering adding it? What other
changes will you be making as a result of this experience? How will you "do
better next time"?

>the press are now all over the OFA team

The write up makes it sound like the whole event went smoothly, yet you're
also saying that there are negative reports in the press. I read the DailyMail
article, and it sounds possible that they are exaggerating by citing the
minority of users who couldn't connect. What is your takeaway here? Do you
have to be perfect in such high profile situations? Or are a few errors
expected? Are you getting flak or losing credibility because of the press, or
is it all falling on the OFA team?

> the call was flawless for the vast majority of those listeners for more than
> 99% of the call

Are more details available? Maybe it's just me, but this sounds wishy-washy
(99% always sounds to me like "a lot, we swear!")

> we think we can do even better next time

Great! Is there going to be a next time? And, more generally, have you noticed
any effect on the call on your user base?

~~~
rexreed
The article linked in the Mixlr blog post
([http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another-
website-another-problem-for-obama/)) seems to tell a different story. From the
NYT's perspective, it seems that a significant number of people had problems
even hearing the audio stream. The way the NYT article is written implies that
many of the listeners, rather than the 0.1% claimed by Mixlr, experienced
problems. And it wasn't due to trolls, but rather the basic problem of people
not even being able to hear the audio.

I don't see what the incentive for NYT to overstate or mischaracterize things,
unless just to cast Obama further into a negative light, so I'm tempted to
believe what the press says over what a self-motivated startup CEO would
write. The NYT article makes no references to trolls, but rather what seems to
be valid claims from would-be listeners that they can't access the audio
stream.

If the audio problems were truly experienced by the insignificant minority,
and a small number of trolls caused the majority of problems, then why was the
article written in the NYT as if the glitches were the primary story, rather
than the content of the broadcast (which is not even covered in the NYT
article). The truth is somewhere between the NYT article and Mixlr blog post,
but most likely weighted more to NYT's side.

I think Mixlr should thank their lucky stars that the blame was placed on OFA
and not on them. In fact, I would be thankful the Mixlr name didn't even
appear in the article. Had they not written the blog post, no one would have
associated the event with their service. Having the president use their
service serves as a good reference, but this one teleconference would not be
what I would consider to be a positive testimonial.

~~~
jmilloy
Well, I wouldn't discount the bias in the New York Times; they have every
incentive to maintain ongoing controversy. Also, notice that it's a NYT _blog_
, which I take less seriously than a news article.

~~~
bradleyland
I don't think this can be understated. The media have a voracious appetite for
controversy, because 24-hour news cycle.

I agree with the parent poster that the truth probably lies somewhere in
between, but like you, I don't think we can give NYT much extra credit here.

I'm also surprised to see that more technologists aren't empathetic to the
"tens of thousands of end users" matter. In a group of people over 100,000, we
can begin to expect a fairly sizable number of users who have configuration
issues that would cause their own host of problems. I'm not indemnifying
Mixlr, but it's worth keeping in mind when finding the middle ground about
what really happened.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The media have a voracious appetite for controversy, because 2-hour news
> cycle.

I think you mean "...because advertising".

------
biot
If I were their VP of Engineering, the questions jmilloy asked would be top of
mind for a post mortem.

I'd also raise the issue of whether the $9.99 all-you-can-eat plan should have
a specific limit in terms of absolute number of live connections. From their
pricing page, it looks like OFA could have just used the Basic (free) plan.
Even still, they will never recoup their costs from this one call even if OFA
remains a $9.99/month subscriber for a decade. If "We worked all weekend..."
means two engineers worked 4 hours Saturday and 4 hours Sunday, that's 8
hours/engineer * 2 engineers * $100/hour = $1600 of time was spent. That's 13
years at $10/month, not even factoring in infrastructure or bandwidth costs
from the call itself. And I'm guessing that estimate is an order of magnitude
less than the actual time spent. If I were a potential customer evaluating
providers, I would be scared off by your current offer of what appears to be
unlimited usage and unlimited priority support for $10/month as I'd have
serious doubts of your ability to remain in business a year from now.

No doubt the effort invested in preparation for the OFA call will pay
dividends for future scalability, but I doubt the people at OFA would have
blinked an eye if you told them that there's a $5 CPM rate for connections
beyond the first 100. 140K connections would have been a paltry $700.
Obviously, only an analysis of your customer usage patterns would indicate
whether you'd impact any serious customers if the basic plan was capped at 100
simultaneous live listeners, with additional tiers for higher peak use. Check
out PubNub's pricing model for peak connections as this model makes financial
sense: [http://www.pubnub.com/pricing](http://www.pubnub.com/pricing)

~~~
jason_tko
There is a tremendous benefit of grabbing hold of an opportunity, and doing
whatever the hell it takes to strangle the value out of it. Which is what
these guys were trying to do.

This was such an outlier in terms of standard use cases of their system so
far, I think the way they responded was great. There's little value in going
back and saying "Ohh... this will cost $700, but it's not written on the
website, is that still ok?" and risk dealing with rejection.

The value of having POTUS use your service far outweighs the engineering time
spent on this. This is now a fantastic leading story for all sorts of
marketing efforts and meetings moving forwards, such as this blog post.

Calculating the return on this effort through short-term ROI measured in days
seems a bit shortsighted.

~~~
biot
I agree that they responded in the only way they could and I hope they can
leverage this to greater success. I wasn't referring to retroactively making
up bogus prices given that their pricing page specifically says it's
"unlimited", even for the Basic free plan. Rather, I'm proposing a
hypothetical scenario whereby future subscriber plans are capped for
simultaneous connections with an overage rate. Had such a pricing plan existed
when OFA initially signed up, I'm speculating that OFA would have happily paid
$700 for the extra capacity for the 140,000 simultaneous listeners.

------
abbottry
40 comments, not one trace of "Congrats", who cares what Obamas intentions
were, for any founder out there you know this is exciting -- HN is becoming
difficult to read.

Congrats guys, it has to feel great having something like this go so well!

~~~
shitlord
Seriously, it's a huge accomplishment, and they deserve to be proud of it.
When the president uses your product (even if it's not good) you know you've
made it.

------
bitemix
$9.99? This is why most people offer an enterprise plan.

~~~
Goopplesoft
I'm surprised OFA thought it'd work at their scale at that price point. I'd
definitely be cautious and offer to pay more if I was their procurement
officer. It could definitely ruin your night.

~~~
giovannibajo1
The blogpost says that OFA contacted them and forewarned about the size of the
call. I guess that's the point where Mixlr could have asked an extra to handle
the scale, while it sounds like they just said "no problems, go ahead".

~~~
Goopplesoft
Right, I was implying that even after they said 'no problems, go ahead'
(perhaps by opening the discussion about an enterprise plan). My reasoning is
because it makes it easier to shift blame for the procurement officer. In the
event of a service failure instead of being picked on for hosting a
presidential conference for the price of a chipotle, you can blame the company
you paid a good amount of money to for their crappy service. Anyhow, glad
everything worked out and I'm sure they made up for it in marketing.

~~~
giovannibajo1
I see. I reckon it doesn't work either way. Think of how wonderful would have
been to run a flawless presidential conference call with $9.99, instead of,
for instance, procuring a custom-made IBM+Cisco contract for $200k.

Maybe there's a number in the middle, but I think it's hard to draw a line. At
the end of the day, if I were a US citizen, I would prefer my government to
attempt with a $9.99 service that went almost flawlessly, rather than ditch it
just because "it's cheap, it can't work, we must pay at least $X".

~~~
Goopplesoft
Although they're private and won't be paying using tax payer money, I agree
and kudos to them. I was just addressing the risks associated with such a
thing.

------
hadem
I never understand the decision behind blogs not putting a link anywhere on
their blog to their actual website.

1\. Mixlr in the header points me to blog.mixlr.com.

2\. Footer links, all of them link to the page I'm on...

I know there is a link in the content of the post, but what about other posts?
Why is there not an easy way for me to get to your main site without manually
modifying the URL in the address bar?

~~~
justhw
Man, I'm gonna start a list and track sites that do this, like plain text
offenders.

------
zer0defex
Cool story, but I hope permission was received first to divulge those account
usage details.

~~~
octo_t
what account details?

~~~
drivingmissm
Normally businesses don't disclose who their customers are without prior
approval.

~~~
maaku
Really? The president does a mass mailing to millions of Americans telling
them about the conference call, where it is hosted, and how to participate..
and you're concerned about revealing him as a customer? I think only the Swiss
are that much of a stickler for privacy.

------
fishercs
one suggestion after signing up for an account and using the service. I
misread and thought there would be video for some reason, i just assumed
webcast would mean streaming audio and video. My mistake, but regardless when
i went to delete my account i found i couldn't actually do that. I had to send
a request to support@mixlr.com to remove an account. Fix that! Overall though,
nice product and the app seemed well laid out and easy to use.

------
vezzy-fnord
_Meanwhile, even though we’re not US voters, our hats are off to the President
and his team for being agile, using third party web services and trying to be
as engaged as possible with his constituents. We love that he’s done an AMA on
Reddit, that his team uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram regularly, and
we’re seriously proud they now use Mixlr too._

\-------

Hardly.

They do maintain some sort of vain presence, so as to appease the college
crowd that make use of large amounts of social media, but no actual debate or
interesting conversation has been inspired by it.

The AMA on Reddit in particular was one of the most pathetic PR stunts I've
witnessed in a while. A few generic responses to mundane and chauvinistic
questions. But, since his campaign team ended up referencing the "NOT BAD"
meme, Reddit swallowed it all up with gusto.

It was sad to watch.

~~~
clarky07
didn't they have planted questions too?

~~~
Wingman4l7
What evidence was there of this?

------
pearjuice
From an achievement point of view, are there are any challenges after this?

~~~
cdibona
Yep, it turns out that post Obama's use of Moderator (and then hangouts with
moderator) we realized that this was only a taste of what can happen when you
have a really popular person using your systems. Yes, I'm talking about Lady
Gaga. Made Obama look downright pedestrian.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
>"we realized that this was only a taste of what can happen when you have a
really popular person using your systems. Yes, I'm talking about Lady Gaga.
Made Obama look downright pedestrian.*

If you work at Mixlr I recommend you kill this comment. It's not best practice
to compare your "pedestrian" customer to someone "really popular".

~~~
jsmthrowaway
You are replying to Chris DiBona, who oversees open source policy at Google.
He is referring to Google Moderator.

