Bowling for Dollars
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I obviously hit a nerve (probably several) with my column on Parrot Secrets. Some of this was expected. The idea of making so much money from an inexpensive web site would appeal to a lot of people, I knew. And I felt good about sharing the story after sitting on it for five years for just that reason. But I wasn’t at all expecting the outrage that some readers felt over the owner of Parrot Secrets not being the nice blonde lady in the picture but a young Indian man who doesn’t even own a parrot. People were pissed and yes, it probably says something about me that I still can’t really understand why they were pissed.
But, as always, I have a theory.
When I was a teacher 26 years ago I worked with a colleague who graded on the basis of improvement and perceived effort while I graded strictly on the final product – the paper or the test – not on how I felt about the student.
We discussed this a lot and my colleague, who still teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area, though no longer at Stanford University where we both worked at the time, felt that she was rewarding hard work, which she saw as far more important than talent. I thought that was crazy. While it may have made some sense to give a student the benefit of the doubt if they showed special initiative and improvement over time if that consideration meant, say, half a grade, I just couldn’t allow the other side, which would have been to grade down the student who just finds that work easy.
Yes, he missed class last week and yes, he may have arrived in class with a hangover, but did you read that paper? The kid’s a genius!
I feel genius should be rewarded.
In retrospect I have to admit that my colleague WAS, herself, a very hard worker and not in any sense a natural while I may have had a hint of a hangover about me, too.
So each of us may have been favoring our own kind.
I think this relates very much to the story of Parrot Secrets. You see what matters to me is not whether Nathalie or Kumar owns the company or even owns a parrot, but that the information provided by Parrot Secrets is useful and customers generally find it to be worth their money. And it seemed to me that was very much the case.
But to some readers that was absolutely NOT the case. They weren’t going to accept Parrot Secrets from Kumar no matter how clever he was, ESPECIALLY if the guy didn’t even own a parrot. They were offended, outraged, betrayed.
Yet I wonder how many web sites, even if they have a Nathalie working there, actually use her picture. While I HAVE seen pictures and video of Orville Redenbacher of popcorn fame and Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken was definitely the real thing, I don’t think Wendy of Wendy’s Restaurants ever appeared in an ad, and Colonel Sanders in his later years absolutely hated what PepsiCo was doing with what had been his restaurant chain.
So is it better to use a real founder in your ads if the founder is lying?
Most web sites don’t use pictures of people they actually know because real people don’t look that good and stock photos are cheaper. Yes, the GoDaddy girl works for GoDaddy, but she doesn’t work AT GoDaddy.
At heart here is truth in advertising, which is s sticky subject for a global network without end-to-end standards of almost any sort. But where truth in advertising CAN be enforced, it always comes down to performance: in this case, is the information from Parrot Secrets useful for raising and training parrots? Based on the company’s commercial success, lack of consumer complaints (until I wrote about it) and the number of competitors who have essentially ripped-off Parrot Secrets material, I’d say it gets a passing grade on truth in advertising.
But that’s just me and I am apparently an unprincipled idiot, or so I am told.
Let’s take it from another angle. When I was in high school the line from the College Board was that SAT preparation wasn’t necessary. Their tests would give you the same grade whether you took a prep class or not. Looking back 40 years later it is fairly clear that was wrong – that prep courses like those pioneered by Stanley Kaplan CAN help and almost always do. I’ve confirmed this, by the way, with friends who later worked at the College Board.
Who is the bad guy here? The College Board explained later that they were trying to maintain a level playing field, which works up to a point, but when enough students are taking prep classes this policy starts to hurt people who are rejected from the right colleges for the wrong reasons.
Does Parrot Secrets hurt people? How? That’s MY measure.
Which brings me, of course, to bowling.
One winter back at the College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio, I took a bowling course that changed my life. P.E. courses were mandatory, and the only alternative that quarter, as I remember it, was a class in wrestling.
A dozen of us met in the bowling alley three times a week for ten weeks. The class was about evenly divided between men and women, and all we had to do was show up and bowl, handing in our score sheets at the end of each session to prove we’d been there. I remember bowling a 74 in that first game, but my scores quickly improved with practice. By the fourth week, I’d stabilized in the 140-150 range and didn’t improve much after that.
Four of us always bowled together: my roommate, two women of mystery (all women were women of mystery to me then), and me. My roommate, Bob Scranton, was a better bowler than I was, and his average settled in the 160-170 range at midterm. But the two women, who started out bowling scores in the 60s, improved steadily over the whole term, adding a few points each week to their averages, peaking in the tenth week at around 120.
When our grades appeared, the other Bob and I got Bs, and the women of mystery received As.
“Don’t you understand?” one of the women tried to explain. “They grade on improvement, so all we did was make sure that our scores got a little better each week, that’s all.”
No wonder they turned the Stanford University bowling alley into a computer room.
I learned an important lesson that day; success in a large organization, whether it’s a university or IBM, is generally based on appearance, not reality. It is understanding the system and then working within it that really counts, not bowling scores or body bags.
In the world of high-tech start-ups, there is no system, there are no hard and fast rules, and all that counts is the end product.
The high-tech start-up bowling league would allow genetically-engineered bowlers, superconducting bowling balls, tactical nuclear weapons—anything to help your score or hurt the other guy’s.
Anything goes, and that’s what makes the start-up so much fun.
But evidently only I see it that way. You probably know better.
I don’t care what business you are talking about, be it McDonalds, Shell, Coke, Chevy, whatever, it is all Marketing people sitting in meeting rooms trying to find ways of tricking you into buying their product. No different from what this “Parrot Secrets” Do you think for a moments when one of those ads on TV tells you they care about you more than their competition, they really mean it? This has been they way since snake oil was sold in the old west, and probably before. Do you think Peyton Manning really cares if you buy a Sony TV? He’s a paid spokesman for Sony. Why? Because someone who really knows what makes a TV good, an expert, won’t sell TV’s, but a likable celebrity will. It’s all Bullshits.
Sadly no matter how you put it. It(parrotsecrets) is still a scam. I could care less about if the lady was real. I care more about the fact that your promoting a scam.
Evan says it’s a scam. How is it a scam? The website provides a service, people pay for the service contractual obligations are fulfilled and everyone is happy. It could be labeled dishonest to say there is a Nathalie when there isn’t, but it’s not a scam. While you’re (not your) free to say it’s dishonest if you feel that way, it’s not illegal so you’re really just upset that somebody is doing well in a way you don’t personally approve of. THAT group is bigger than you know my friend… it’s a whole world of people you’re just not aware of.
I don’t understand the problem. Somebody is selling information – a non-refundable non-tangible. This is very common for content providers. The marketing campaign has fictitious representation. Well duh. I always thought those words were synonymous. The buyers are not being coerced through threats or bait and switch. The content may very well be useful – despite possibly free alternatives in the library, online forums, etc.
There are no victims here. Customers must do there due diligence.
I know I’ve read that story about the bowling class somewhere. Where was it published before?
– T
Bob mentions the story in his book Accidental Empires (UK edition) for essentially the same reasons. Geeks like myself are always astonished at the contextual limitations most people put upon their reality. I find intense irony in the strong likelihood that many complainants about Parrot Secrets also drink bottled water.
I am so surprised by the number of people claiming to be so betrayed by the parrot lady who doesn’t exist. Betty Crocker, no such person. Mr. Clean, no such person. The Maytag Man, not really a repairman. Should I go on? I am not going to stop buying dog treats becuase they say Scooby Doo dog treats and have pitcture of Scoob Doo on them. (Y’all know he’s fake, right? And he’s got some nerve to endorse dog cookies!) If the parrot information is legit, then you must acquit. Everyone wants a reason to be up in arms about something, as if there is some profit to accusing someone of wrong-doing.
Cringley, this is easily the worst article of yours that I’ve read.
There is no way you can relate that stupid teacher’s ridiculous grading system to the complaints people had in the parrot article. They’re not related. Not at all. Streeeeetch.
And, btw, Wendy’s is named after a real person, and while she didn’t appear in an add, she appears on the fucking gigantic plastic sign and in the damn logo. COME ON.
Everybody does it; therefore it’s acceptable? Poor, painfully poor. Moreover, you spread the argument like thin butter: little substance; lotta’ words. And, what’s with the bowling analogy? A crowd-pleasing, pseudointellectual post. Disappointing.
I love the parrotsecrets article.
It shows just how someone who is entrepeneurial, methodical and focused can create a business.
Do you think ANYONE you see on television hawking a product gives a rat fuck about the product their hawking? I mean, honestly, you care in the most cynical of ways: are you getting paid enough based on how this could effect your name positively or negatively? That’s the gig.
Who cares if the spokesmodel is real? Who cares if she “actually” gave the “reviews”? The kid cut and pasted some feedback, and created a persona.
I think hearing that a young kid from India is raking in some serious cash for a relatively “simple” idea has peoples’ brains on underload…
Cringely, ignore the trolls. Don’t even waste blog space to explain yourself, re-educate, or change someone elses feeble mind. If they truly understood the message, they would get their pencils pushing and figure out a way to make some of their own money.
I don’t have a problem with the idea, but I do have a problem with the website (my damn mouse wheel broke) — it looks like a typical “make $10,000 per week” site. I left the site with the impression that it was produced by a scam-artist.
If the guy really earns $400,000 per year, then why doesn’t he spend a little of that to build a more polished site? Doesn’t he want to earn even more money? Why doesn’t he use Google Adwords (he can certainly afford it)?
In other words, his current marketing strategy is typical of someone who earns $40,000 per year — the $400,000 figure sounds like baloney to me…
Correction: it is stated that he does use Adwords in the original article, but I cannot see the ad when entering parrot as a search term…
Bob, if I were you, i’d just admit that i picked a really, really bad example for a productive business, but say that the original point still stands, that there’s still a ton of room for good, productive, and lucrative internet businesses.
You simply picked a bad example. Why’s your example bad?
- This company provides a poorer product and a higher price than something as simple as borrowing book from a library, or making friends with their local pet store bird expert
- This company is run by an experienced SEOer, which most bird book authors (think they) cannot afford. Furthermore, real bird experts won’t stoop to the ethical grey areas that this guy has, because they have reputations to uphold. This guy runs his bird site under scores of different names–to the average internet user, if parrot-book-secrets.com gets a bad review, they won’t figure that my-lovely-parrot-book.com is the same site.
- The majority of the earnings of this company come from rent-seeking activities, not the sort of economic productivity that helps the economy. Let me give you a hyperbolic example: Suppose there were two car makers, MEmotors, and Icringe. Let’s say MEmotors had a billion dollar advertising budget, and you spent nothing since Icringe does not believe in advertising (bunch o’ engineers). Now, everyone’s heard of MEmotors, and no one knows that Icringe exists. So I can charge a monopoly-level price, say twice of my actual costs on the car, because no one knows you exist. People are happy buying MEmotors cars at $100k, because no other cars exists as far as they know! Icringe sells a car for $20k at a small modest profit, but no one knows they exist. The result is that society pays too much for cars and wastes money on dancing television jingles. (This lasts for the short run, until Icringe figures out how to advertise…then in the long run, prices come down, but we’re still all wasting money on advertising). Advertising isn’t our economy’s savior, it’s one of its pitfalls.
There really are very good businesses out there selling online newsletters and ebooks. You simply chose about the worst possible example.
Oh yeah, and the bowling alley at Stanford didn’t become a computer room; the computer room is upstairs in Tresidder. If i recall correctly the bowling alley was next to the Coho, where the current Treehouse and the glass-walled fitness center are. Feel free to email me if you need a pair of eyes to review your posts, Cringely.
Paul Graham agrees with you on the “big company” versus “startup” mentality. As do I: being a founder in a small company myself, I’m sometimes a little shocked by the attitudes of some of our employees. Then again, I was once there myself, and that is how we’re trained in school, as you pointed out. (Paul Graham has pointed this out, too.)
That said, I have to agree with Andrew; parrot-book-secrets.com is rather on the rent-seeking side. One of the reasons I started a business is because I didn’t want to be there: I wanted to actually produce something fairly significant.
cjs@cynic.net
[...] Bowling for Dollars – Parrot Secrets [...]
Hi, Just found your blog surfing on the internet! I am too much interested in the information like you are providing. Why you do not write a new ebook and publish it by collecting more information on this topic. NO! Do not take me wrong! I am not a publisher. Ha! Ha! Ha! You have written in a detailed manner that’s why I am asking you about the ebooks. Have you ever thought of any type of ebook and in its business. It is a really hardwork to create a blog like yours and to maintain it. But you have done really a great job. Congrates! I have few questions. Do you think that blogs are better than ebooks for providing information and making money. I Just take the ebooks as products. I have never tried to write any ebook and to do any sort of business. If I say something about my website here, then you will consider this comment as a spam and NO One like that. But would like to say, that while selling FREE EBOOKS I have made such a huge amount, just in few days, that you will be amazed! If you visit my website (by clicking on my name in this comment) then you are bound to be surprised. I am sure this is a new technique of selling, I have found over the net. But lets talk about writing ebooks and providing unique information to the internet community, have you ever tried writing anything and publishing it? Do you also sell ebooks? What is your experience? I am interested in knowing about it or your experiments? Waiting for reply – Thanks, Regards
PPC Classroom Bonus…
……
Advantageously, the article is in reality the freshest on this worthw hile topic. I agree with your conclusions and will eagerly anticipate ones own next updates. Simply stating thanks is not going to just be sufficient, for the phenomenal clarity within your writing. I’ll without delay find your rss to keep abreast of any kind of updates. Gratifying work and much success in your business endeavors!