Archive for October, 2010
Chris Dixon had a characteristically smart blog post recently where he states that he can’t take Investors or commentators seriously on the topic of social services when they themselves don’t use social services.
Chris owes it to his cofounder Katerina Fake that he became an avid blogger and tweeter. And I owe my own entry into social services to WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, who in 2005 insisted that I blog as a condition to investing in the company he was starting,
Automattic.
I wholeheartedly agree with Dixon that to be a good social investor requires that you participate in them. But a caveat: while using social services is critical to understanding the medium, relying on one’s personal taste in social services to shape an investment strategy is a recipe for disaster. It makes a helluva lot more sense instead to look to user metrics and behavior, even if limited, than to rely on a data point of one.
I was chatting yesterday with one of the early leaders in building highly viral Facebook apps. When I asked him what he was thinking of doing next, I was surprised by his answer: NOT another insanely viral app.
His explanation was instructive. After a few years mastering the viral game, what he came to realize is that the most viral apps need to be purpose built to be viral in a particular channel. The problem this leads to, though, is that this focus on virality comes at the expense of being a great consumer experience.
The flip side is that applications that are wildly popular with users will become “viral” (or at least grow rapidly) in their own right, even if not strictly optimized for it. Mint.com is a great example, as is well described in this Quora thread.
The social app developer ecosystem is, albeit gradually, waking up to this reality. To be sure, plenty of energy is going into working the viral channels; but at the same time I am seeing more and more developers realizing that an overemphasis on virality delivers more short term gain than longterm value creation.
Earlier this week I had dinner with an up-and-coming entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and he recounted the history of his young but very interesting startup.
During its initial phase the project was directed at using a new technology to solve a range of different problems, and had received funding and a fair amount of buzz for this.
But after a few months he noticed that a particular feature was getting much more usage than the others. So, at this point, he decided to really focus on that one particular feature, on one particular platform, and really nail the user experience. Which he did: since launching, he has seen awesome adoption both in terms of number of users and user engagement.
Another great example of how getting product out there, and following your users, can help lead you to success.
And, the lesson here — the right time to focus is when your users tell you to
