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Another crucial ingredient I believe is the ability to sustain the community's loyalty to your offering ("stickiness", if I may use a Web 1.0 word). For instance, EBay is able to do it with the revenue potential. LinkedIn seems to do it by strengthening the member's network with every new link, which makes leaving that much harder.
Lack of this element may explain the reports on users shifting from one social network site to another. There is nothing tangible, monetary or otherwise, to keep users coming back once the novelty wears off.
-Instant (or near instant) gratification - this means I don't have to download something and get a ton of friends on the thing before I actually get some goodness from the product/service.
-Clear use case. Duh! Some sites are impossibly hard to understand when you show up for the first time. If I can figure out what to do there in about 10 seconds, forget it. You've lost me.
- Improve an existing user behavior rather than require a new user bahavior.
- Non-linear economies of scale. Obvious example is communication products but it could apply to cost reduction as well as user adoption.
- Previously unknown ability to personalize. Personalizing shopping, media, medical recommendations, restaurants, etc. The beauty of the web is in finding new ways to get ME exactly what I want.
- New or proprietary access to data presented in simple ways. It's cool when companies take previously unknown, inaccessible or complex data and make it usable for consumers to make decisions. Zillow, Farecast, and lots of others do this.
- Assume people are really lazy and mostly selfish. Businesses predicated on people doing stuff just because it helps others are a bit naive (this doesn't mean people don't want to participate in collective projects, ala Wikipedia).
- Help me get the stuff I want cheaper or make better decisions about stuff I will buy.
- Help me get access to my media in new places I couldn't get it before, e.g., my music or movies or shows on the go (iPod, TiVo, SlingBox)
- If it's mobile, does it work on all handsets or just some? Do I need to integrate with the carrier or does the service just work out of the box?
There's more, but those are a few I thought I would add.
-Mike
Nice to hear from you and thanks for taking the time to add to the list. I tried to keep the list broad and parallel, while some of your criteria are a little bit more specific. I do like and agree with most of them. I think the one that stands out to me the most is your first point around instant gratification.
I would re-state this as receiving a high degree of personal value from the service without their needing to be network effects in place before value is received. There were some good posts on this particular topic floating around the Web 2.0 blogs awhile back.
The other point that I like a lot is new and proprietary access to data.
Thanks,
Nisan
In other words, is anyone reading these things besides other blog writers and parasitic attention starved one man startups.
LOL.
I fit in a third category... guy looking for some time to kill on the net. Randomly hit these blogs, same one never more than once/twice a quarter.
If you can demonstrate even 3 of the 7 listed above in the real world, the investors will come find you! Unfortunately, a compelling business plan isn't enough these days. My advice is to build the service and prove that you meet some of the points above. Don't waste your time looking for investors.
as with your other articles on Startup-Review.com, definitely worth the read.
- dave
-heath
Last night I wrote a business / feature development plan for a startup (which is about to build out a new web app). Every one of your points is represented in it. Which makes me feel even more positive about 2007... : )
c.
1. If just a duplicate of an existing service/site, how will this make a difference? When you have free sites, you cannot gain market share by undercutting on price! Adding some cool feature is often not enough as the big name ones can add these quickly and easily too (unless so unique you can get a patent, but then the question is whether users want it).
2. How will it make money? You kind of left that out! Some rely on ads only - so the question is whether you can get enough ads using some technique to add value (ie. targeting, keyword matching, profile matching, etc); will the kind of users match the advertisers who will actually place ads? If you rely on free accounts with fees to add features, how many will pay and for how long? The risk in many of these is that few will use the fee services, or will only use for a couple months and cancel.
Where do men/boys go? - whereever there are women/girls.. !
ajay
Teenwag
Yeah, I know it's hard especially when your not making any money and time is limited but if it were easy everyone would be internet millionaires.
The truth is you can do it. All you need to do is understand how to focus your energy like all the top performers in any industry in the world. Through repetition, patience will be something you can turn on and off like a light switch. But what kind of repetition you ask?
“If you listen to your fears, you will die never knowing what a great person you might have been.”
-Robert H. Schuller-
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