

Tales of an Instant Company - the founding of epinions.com - sharpshoot
http://www.benchmark.com/news/articles/nyt_epinions.html

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sanj
I think it is important to read more about epinions. Beyond the fact that it
is pretty much dead today, was firesaled, and was had some nasty interpersonal
personnel issues, I think it is a classic example of a company with a
unmanageable story:

"Here's how it works: we convince people to write opinions. And then when
someone else reads that opinion, and ranks it highly, we'll give the writer a
piece of an affiliate link sale."

There's way, way, way too many steps involved in making a few pennies.

The story that you tell your users (all of them) is very important. Epinion's
was pretty miserable.

A buddy of mine said that one of the reasons that Google's a money machine is
that it is dead easy for a neophyte web advertiser to set up an ad:

1\. Pick some words 2\. Pick how much you want to pay 3\. Done.

That's the level of story you want to tell.

Measure your story against that.

~~~
sharpshoot
Great point sanj.

Its also something Niklas Zennstrom articulates about picking problems to
solve: pick simple propositions e.g. Skype: free phone calls, Joost: Tv when
you want it, Kazaa: share files easily in order to reach a mainstream market.

Whats your background btw - shoot me an email, i'm pretty interested.

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steveplace
I love the fact that this aggregator pulls up articles before the bubble. The
language and the tone of the entire article is like nothing can go wrong. It's
great.

It's also interesting that the author of the article foreshadowed "Web 2.0"
before it was coined 5 years later. The Tom Sawyer model. Brilliant.

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thomasptacek
> Everything is faster. Zero drag is optimal. For a while, new applicants
> would jokingly be asked about their ''drag coefficient.'' Since the office
> is a full hour's commute from San Francisco, an apartment in the city was a
> full unit of drag. A spouse? Drag coefficient of one. Kids? A half point
> per. Then they recognized that such talk, even in jest, could be taken as
> discriminatory in a hiring situation.

"Could be taken as"? It is discriminatory. And Epinions failed; the Reddit
team built a more valuable property with a tiny fraction of the time and
effort.

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joshwa
Dot bomb or not, this article does inspire me to go out and make stuff happen
fast!

"This is not a strategy play, this is an execution play" sure describes a
whole lot of web2.0 startups...

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wastedbrains
Still around since 1999, but it still sucks seriously does anyone even use
epinions. I have never found it useful while searching and comparing products
online.

I guess that is a good thing since we are working on a competitor of sorts.

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webwright
Web 2.0 in 1999.

I love how they talk about how fast and easy it is to create a web company
"nowadays".

