Gustav von Sydow on digital advertising, online media and tech start-ups

This is a post I made over at the Burt blog – it’s an update on Copybox and a quick rant about my feeling on creating ad tech vs. lightweight web apps, so I figured it might be relevant here aswell.

Last year we presented Copybox at Techcrunch50. But so far, the number of people we’ve let on is very limited. Partly because Jacob Nielsen tells us to, but mostly because we’re the target audience ourselves and still know plenty of stuff that need fixing. Also, since the economy went south we’ve had to focus most of our limited resources on Rich and other platform part of our products that generates enough money for us to stay in business.

(quick rant on the hardships of building an ad tech business is coming up – ok to skip if you just want the state of Copybox haha)

Burt’s platform sofware is often mission critical to the campaigns we run, and need to be able to scale from hundereds to tens of thousands of requests per second, with zero performance loss in minutes. For real. Add that SLAs that require four nine uptimes are not uncommon, and you realize that we deal with different challenges than the average web startup. Ad tech requires massive scale from the first user, and bailing out using the fail whale just isn’t an option. The people talking about how building a web business these days is “easy”, “cheap” and “fast” certainly haven’t tried to build what we’re doing

One big challenge is that creating great advertising technology incorporates the most demanding parts from both B2C and B2B at once, meaning that we need to make products people actually want to use (like in B2C), but feedback cycles are often long and reliability is crucial (like in B2B). Not to mention that working capital can be a real bitch… little depending on your business model I guess (simple licensing deals for instance are not included), but in most cases getting the really attractive gross margins requires a big dip in working cap on your behalf. Not even Amazon or Akamai can save you here. It just costs plenty of money to build the ad exchanges, trading systems and demand side platforms that everyone (incl. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) are having wet dreams about controlling

In case anyone is keeping score, these are the main reasons why you see lots of ad tech startups raise tens of millions of dollars, still with nothing to show for it. But it’s also the reason we’ve seen a handful of multi billion dollar deal purchases in our market the last two year’s alone, so I guess that’s ok from an investor POV

But let’s get back to Copybox! Constrained resources or not, as it turns out, revolutionizing creative writing is a lot harder than we thought. Which is probably one of the reasons that the word processor has been untouched for 20 years. But we are making progress. Burt is probably in iteration 10 or so after Techcrunch50, one big change being that we’re now on the desktop.

Don’t worry “I’m a PC” fanboys, we’ve got it for you guys too. Also, we’ve started to rework the design with (not so little) help from Andreas and Jaan to push a less dark and gothic feel to something you might actually like to spend 8 hours a day looking at.

We’ve also realized that for the first full release of Copybox, creating dynamic content is not enough to deliver the kind of organic idea growing (trippy…) kind of experience that we’re aiming for. So we’re adding features that will be part of every writing tool – (good) outlining, remixed “undo/redo” functionality and a (working) set of language tools for grammar, spelling etc. And no in-document formatting, just structure. There are tons of super awesome design tools. Use them.

But first, we’ll release a version of desktop Copybox with dynamic content. ETA 6 weeks. You probably won’t (but it’s not impossible) put a dent in the creative universe with that version of Copybox, but at least you’ll have tangible proof that someone is actually working on making your creative writing tool smarter, better, faster and stronger.

Booyah.