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While it is scary, this financial crisis is the breaking of our traditional economy. What is amazing is that this is happening on a global scale. It isn’t just about one country, but about one large global economy that is being broken. Now, it is our time to remake it.
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You can look at our situation as Sequoia did in their famous RIP Good Times session for their entrepreneurs, or you can look at this as a new economy. How will it be remade? What do you know now that will be wrong for the future? What will be right?
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Startup Founder Evolution – Tony Wright dot com
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At one of the other panels at the Web 2.0 conference, Dave McClure (master of 500 hats and 473 font colors– and one of the smartest guys in the game) summed up the life-cycle of a startup in a great way. “There’s the product development phase, the market development phase, and the revenue development– or revenue optimization– phase.” Rings true to me.
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As I’ve said before, the business guy often doesn’t have a lot to do in the early stage of product development– especially if the builders are building something that they actually want themselves. If you’re a bunch of hackers building a simple photo sharing, you don’t need a business guy telling you what the market wants. Of course, if you’re a bunch of hackers building business time management software, you might well need that. Your mileage may vary.
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But as the market development phase sets in, builder entrepreneurs are oftentimes increasingly obsolete. It’s no longer time to hurl features willy nilly at your users– you’ve already built something that they like. No you need to measure the hell out of it and turn it into something that they love. You need to iterate on it and turn it into something that confuses 4% of your new users instead of 7%. It means finding a way to tune your viral loop and conquer your SEO enemies to increase the organic flow to your product. And you need to start expoloring the market to figure out who they hell is going to pay for all of this. That means crafted adwords campaigns. That means cold calling. That means price experimentation. That means exploring the world of direct ad sales. Well, it can mean all sorts of things, depending on whether you are a free web service, a freemium product, a pure b2b play or some combination thereof.
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As Papa PG says, if you look at the leaders of successful tech companies you see more CS degrees than you see MBAs. That makes sense– geeks are critical to conquer the first (and most important) problem of a startup… Building a badass product. But if you look at these same tech companies, you see CS geeks who’ve actually set aside their geeky roots (though maybe not their geeky instincts) and become very very shrewd business guys. And you also see inferior products kicking the crap out of superior products through better sales/marketing/and distribution.
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So to all of you builders out there… Beware! When you reach a challenge in the evolution of your business, the most natural thing in the world is to frame it as a product problem. “If we just build this new feature/product, we’ll be off to the races and we’ll never have to do any of that business crap!”. Keep your eyes peeled for the time when you have to personally evolve and start tackling business problems, or step out of the way and let someone else do it for you.
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tony, have you been following any of the “customer development process” that Eric Ries and Venturehacks have been referencing? A summary of that process is to flip market and product development, and make sure you understand your channels, target customers, and build the smallest possible product to accommodate those needs. In that case, the biz guys can get started super early.
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I think the best market research is throwing an early version of a product at users. Market research can yield from pretty interesting/valuable information, but I’m not sure that it can create a recipe for a good product. I watched Jobster (my previous employer) spend tons of time getting smart about the market, but they have yet to build a product that excites their market.
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The problem with Agile development is that all the advantages only confer to the technology side, and you can often end up with a very monolithic view of customer/distribution/etc. And by not iterating on those at the same time you’re iterating on the product, you are building up huge risk by sequencing these steps out. That is, “Agile development” = waterfall for business end, agile on technology.
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I think for consumer internet startups the “throw an early version of a product at users” model tends to work well because it lets your target customer find you. A lot of what Blank describes in the early chapters of his book is similar to what you advocate. He suggests finding a market for the product you have developed rather than the focus group approach of trying to develop a product for the market you have identified.
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Hacker News | Ask HN: Realizing Your Idea Isn’t Original
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I recently came up with an idea for a web app that I’ve been getting pretty excited about. I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks doing research and today discovered that another company is already executing the idea. Not only are they executing it, but they’re doing a pretty good job of it.
How important do you consider the originality of an idea to be? I have decided to embrace my variations on the idea, the size of the market, and go ahead with developing it.
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We used it as a basis for solving disagreements. Whenever we couldn’t agree or decide what to do, we just say “what is our competitor doing?” It isn’t about copying per se, it’s about keeping momentum and getting past decision problems.
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The general idea doesn’t need to be original at all. There was search before Google, social networks before facebook, video before YouTube, etc.
Sometimes the specifics of the idea can be important though. For example, take Google: lets use hyperlink data to rank websites
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Truly original ideas are terrible things to base products on. It takes people a vary long time to accept things that are actually revolutionary.
Instead, its often better to just take something familiar and make it better or adapt it for a certain niche. Make an ipod, not a segway.
- It’s also hard to find the right implementation and design for a truely original idea because of no reference. – post by joel
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We like to believe in creation, but what’s actually happening is evolution, not creation. Original ideas are like genetic mutations of old ideas and are not strong enough to survive and win.
I think that the strongest ideas are never really original, they are just better implementations of the existing ones.
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Incredibly, emphatically, overwhelmingly unimportant. In fact, I would say that if your idea was truly original, that would be extremely worrying from a business standpoint.
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If they’re doing a good job of it more or less the way you’d be doing it, bail. You want to be crusading for your future users, saving them from the crap they would have to put up with if you weren’t helping them. If you don’t think you are making a big difference for your users, you won’t have the necessarily inner fire to win.
Ideally you do a startup where other companies are doing something badly, their users hate them, and they still make money.
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As you’re coding you’ll definitely do things differently. You can even learn from your competitors mistakes, because you can regard their product as your “prototype”. And because you have a competitor you can be pretty sure there is a market and (potential) customers. This is a good thing.
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That being said, being able to do something differently matters. Especially if you are in a niche market, it is much more difficult to get and keep traction without first-mover advantage.
Innovation in the way you will get traffic is one of the ways to distinguish yourself. If you are a paid service, consider integrating better commission/affiliate systems. They work.
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I consider it a kind of validation of an idea to see that other people are working on the same thing, but I know how you feel. It depends on your product and market, but I think there’s pretty much always room for more than one success story.
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My experience: I began with one concept that seemed really cool to me, I did a little research and saw things vaguely similar, but they didn’t get “my” idea (fortunately for me, I didn’t find the several attempts that did get my idea). But as I began executing, I hit a roadblock – something that really spoiled my idea, made it impossible to realize the cool vision properly. I asked around, dejectedly, and someone suggested I look at how an unrelated project solved that particular problem – I did that and found the solution! But then bizarre twist 1: through doing this, I came to realize that the “unrelated project” was really doing exactly the same thing as me – just in a different sense.
I would not have seen this connection (and did not) until I was intimidate with the details (i.e. was at a new vantage point). Bizarre twist 2: the title of my project perfectly described both my old conception and my new conception, although I could not see this ambiguity til after the journey. -
Also, consider that if that German hadn’t invented the automobile, Ford still would have. i.e. Ford wasn’t inspired by that German, because he was already working on an automobile. His autobiography is very good: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10.txt*
- Lesson for startup founders: your competition built the prototype first. Maybe you should still keep going forward, if you expect to have a solid competitive advantage?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365962 – post by joel
- Lesson for startup founders: your competition built the prototype first. Maybe you should still keep going forward, if you expect to have a solid competitive advantage?
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UCLA study finds that searching the Internet increases brain function / UCLA Newsroom
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UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function.
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Internet searches revealed a major difference between the two groups. While all participants demonstrated the same brain activity that was seen during the book-reading task, the Web-savvy group also registered activity in the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas of the brain, which control decision-making and complex reasoning.
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Compared with simple reading, the Internet’s wealth of choices requires that people make decisions about what to click on in order to pursue more information, an activity that engages important cognitive circuits in the brain.“A simple, everyday task like searching the Web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older,” Small said.
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Create a niche search engine with Yahoo! BOSS (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)
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THE SHALLOWEST GENERATION | The Big Picture
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James Quinn is a senior director of strategic planning at The Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania. James has held the positions of treasurer, controller, and head of strategic planning at with retailers, homebuilders and the university in his 22-year career. He earned a BS in accounting from Drexel University and an MBA from Villanova University.
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2000年5月，百度首次为门户网站——硅谷动力提供搜索技术服务，之后迅速占领中国搜索引擎市场，成为最主要的搜索技术提供商。2001年8月，发布Baidu.com搜索引擎Beta版，从后台技术提供者转为面向公众独立提供搜索服务，并且在中国首创了竞价排名商业模式，2001年10月22日正式发布Baidu搜索引擎
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