(This is the first in a two part post. Part one contains a profile of a startup.  Part two contains numbers and analysis related to that startup.)

Mobile Spinach is a small and ambitious Bay Area startup focused on the mobile coupon space.  The company is still at a very early stage — seed funded and looking for funding.  Earlier this month I had the pleasure of talking with co-founder Anthony Vitti.  We had a great discussion about the difficulties of effective marketing for local businesses, and Anthony laid out his vision for Mobile Spinach and the opportunity he sees.

Mobile Spinach’s offering for consumers is a compelling one: “Get exclusive deals and mobile phone alerts from our Tastemakers who hit the streets to find you the best deals when, where, and how you want them.” Think local trend-blog meets social-shopping meets mobile-couponing: Thrillist meets ThisNext meets Cellfire.  Whereas existing coupon services like Cellfire and 8Coupons focus on product discounts (Save 25c on toilet paper!!), Mobile Spinach focuses on deals from local lifestyle businesses: Shopping, Night life, Events, Travel, Dining and Food, Arts and Music, Gyms and Spas.  One of their co-founders runs a contemporary San Francisco lifestyle brand called Artificial Flavor, so they’ve got experience with fashion trends.

With Mobile Spinach, you receive deals only from the Tastemakers you’ve chosen to follow.  These folks are the site’s power users — aggressive well-connected individuals who introduce their favorite local businesses to Mobile Spinach’s service and get special deals for their followers.

Mobile SMS couponing requires a light touch.  Consumers don’t want to be interrupted with advertising that’s not relevant to them.  Mobile Spinach understands this very well: “Less is more” says Anthony.  Relevancy and customization are crucial to Mobile Spinach’s vision of an empowered consumer who is able to “dial down” the service as needed.  Besides using Tastemakers as filters (so consumers only receive deals that match their taste), Anthony suggested that consumers will be able to make further customizations like electing to receive coupons ‘only on Tuesday nights’ and ‘only from nearby restaurants.’

For these local businesses, Mobile Spinach helps them engage local consumers and market themselves effectively.  According to Mobile Spinach, there are very few ways for small to medium business owners to get noticed — traditional media, SEO, and SEM all have high costs and questionable efficacy.  With Mobile Spinach, 500-1000 SMS messages are typically sent for a campaign and the company reports double-digit response rates.  The company also reports getting double digit CPM rates for their mobile advertisements.

For Mobile Spinach, tastemakers act as sort of a crowdsourced marketing effort as they spread the word about the service to their friends.  More importantly, they bring local businesses onboard to advertise with Mobile Spinach — and receive a 20-30% commission.  These tastemakers, combined with a traditional in house salesforce, are designed to make the service scalable.  Anthony envisions having 20 tastemakers in each of 30 cities across the country once the service expands to full size.

Mobile Spinach has a nice vision for a social-recommendation local couponing business.  Furthermore, Mobile Spinach shows sensitivity and insight into the typical issues plaguing SMS advertising.  But can they make the numbers work?

Well, let’s do some back of the envelope calculations…

(continue to part two)

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But what happens when these tasks require some modicum of creativity too?  Things get interesting. Encouraged by Amazon’s “content creation” use case (see image on right), I decided to see if I couldn’t outsource copy writing.

Here’s the task I submitted:

I’m feeling sad.  Won’t you give me a compliment?

Please give me a compliment. Be original, please. The funnier the better. Timely compliments (relating to obama, layoffs, bailouts, madoff etc) are especially appreciated.  Slightly raunchy compliments are great too.

Specifically, I wanted 50 witty compliments delivered, and I offered users 10 cents per compliment.  Amazon charged me 50 cents too, so the total cost of the experiment was $5.50  Here were my favorites:

• I really like the fact that you aren’t the surgeon who implanted eight embryos into a mother of six children.
• Do you take karate? because your body’s kicking!
• Your looking better than the economic forcast for the next decade!
• If I told you that you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?
• Are you a parking ticket? Cos you got fine written all over.
• Do you have a map? I just keep on getting lost in your eyes.
• You have abs like Obama.
• I love how you always keep your word, example, when you said you would pull out, you did.  Quite different from my last man, Bush.
• You are the smartest, funniest, best looking, most all-around great guy that I have never met.  All guys want to be you and all women want to date you.  And if none of that helps, try getting drunk.  Best of luck to you.

Also unexpected was that my full name would be publicly listed next to my task.  Several of the submissions addressed me by name, or commented on my name:

• Jonathan,  I enjoy how your first and last name both have equal number of syllables and vowels.  Very balanced.  Good job sir.
• Your surname is so very smoothy and sexy-sounding, sibilant and sultry. It makes me think of wagons, wagon trains, and governors.
• You’re such a sweetheart, Jonathan. Best of luck to you.

And many of the compliments I got were directly related to Amazon Turk itself, often commenting on the free money I was giving away.

• I’m not exactly sure what to say to that but, you could just give me the $0.10 because I’m a cool person…haha.  And believe me, in today’s economy, I could use every penny I could get.  Anyway, have a good day. 
• You are very nice to be creating this HIT.
• Cheer up, dude!  You’re a Requester here, not a turker, heck I’m making big plans for the ten cents this HIT pays, so you have bettered somebody’s day, and that’s a good thing, right?  Obama is president, so your life will improve soon. You’re having a good hair day, right? Sorry, it’s hard to compliment someone online, and I am NOT saying anything raunchy.
• In times like these, who can be better than a guy helping the normal folk with a bailout?

Some compliments were just plain creepy…

• Johny boy you are the center of my world and while the economy sinks deeper and deeper my heart grows and my loins tingle thinking of you.

Others were creative but a little off-kilter:

• Jon, if I had to describe you, I would say you are the Canada of the world, stable, slightly annoying, but in the end the one who does lose their shirt in this poker match we call a world economy…mostly because nobody invited you to the game.
• The stock markets are plunging like never before; i believe that they’ll soon reach zero and then restart the counter! ! !

And many assumed that my sadness resulted from layoffs:

• You are too good for that job anyway!
• You are so good-looking and brilliant that even if you are layed off, another company will snap you up within days!  You are so desirable, you will have too many offers to pick from!  Everybody wants you!!!!!
• My, dont be upset, Recession is a cycle of ups and down, good times will soon come. Infact faster then you think as Obama has come with knowledge.   And Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
• Hey cheer up! Some of that bailout pork money is designated for sad people. Just go to city hall and frown.

Some weren’t really compliments but instead jokes:

• Police arrested two kids yesterday. One was drinking battery acid and the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other one off!  HAHAHA hilarious!

And some rather lengthy jokes too:

A group of frogs were traveling through the woods, and two of them fell into a deep pit. All the other frogs gathered around the pit. When they saw how deep the pit was, they told the unfortunate frogs they would never get out.

The two frogs ignored the comments and tried to jump up out of the pit. The other frogs kept telling them to stop, they were as good as dead. Finally, one of the frogs took heed to what the frogs were saying and simply gave up. He fell down and died.

The other frog continued to jump as hard as he could. Once again, the crowd of frogs yelled at him to stop the pain and suffering and just die.

He started to jump even harder and finally made it out. But when he got out, the other frogs asked him, “Why did you continue jumping? Didn’t you hear us telling you to quit.” The frog explained to them that he was deaf.

He thought they were Encouraging him the entire time.

And one was strangely rhymed poetry:

Obama in the White House,
Madoff headed to the Big House.
Jonathan, he can’t grouse,
No foreclosure on his house.

He didn’t get the layoff,
Didn’t take no payoff,
Didn’t lose his cash to Madoff,
Jonathan, to you my hat is off!

Were my expectations met?

The results as a whole weren’t as good as I had hoped for — I’ve only shared the interesting compliments here.  Many of the compliments were in broken English ( You’re so smart and good with money. Not many people have such a good head as you.), extremely mundane (You are the greatest) or attempted to weave in current events in a way that didn’t work (Your looking great today and at least your ears aren’t looking like obamas.)

I had hoped that the task would only be accepted by those who already had a brilliant compliment ready at the tip of their tongue, similar to how the Citi logo (with the red arc over ‘citi’ forming an umbrella) was done in 10 seconds (I strongly recommend watching the video — fast-forward to the halfway point).  I had hoped that the majority of uninspired users without a ready compliment  would pass over the task, essentially cherry-picking only users with the wittiest compliments.  But the average Turker spent 88 seconds on my task (a $4.09 hourly rate)…Oh well, just goes to show how dedicated Turkers are to solving the task in front of them!  Curious who these people are?  See the faces of mechanical turk.

Readers — would love to hear your thoughts on Amazon Mechanical Turk and other interesting experiments I could perform with the service.  Please leave comments… and compliments are obviously encouraged too!

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If you could see the difference, you’d see soap leaves an invisible layer of scum on your skin… Dove leaves no soap scum

Then, the scene suddenly switches to ultraviolet-murder-scene-lighting to reveals a woman covered with soap scum.  The ad labels it as an “artistic dramatization.”

Ok fine, so the election advertising has turned ugly lately but when did fear mongering become an acceptable tactic to sell soap?!

Martin Bishop points out that the ad is dramatically different from Dove’s earlier Campaign for Real Beauty and the jarring disconnect between messages may weaken the brand.  Personally, I can’t help but associate the ad (and the brand) with the frightening shower scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in which a beautiful woman suddenly changes into a hideous creature (see photo on left).

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Watch the Dove commercial below:

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• Part one: Startup Spotlight: Mobile Spinach