

Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed - peter123
http://mashable.com/2009/02/24/paul-buchheit-startup-tips/

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brlewis
Paul surely is responsible for a large part of what FriendFeed is today, but
the parents who were there at birth are Bret and Jim:
<http://friendfeed.com/about/team>

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mikeryan
Not really very insightful. And the don't need virality if your product is
good bit really hasn't been proven out.

There are many superior products out there that have lost to the competition
(especially in the social network space) because they never gained enough
early traction.

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paul
I didn't really say that you "don't need" virality, but that the best kind is
a product that people love so much that they want to tell everyone about it
(which is a kind of virality).

Obviously, the need for virality also differs based on what you are building.
For social networks, having your friends there is a big part of what makes it
a "good product". For a search engine, that's less important.

What bothers me is the focus on virality over actual value creation. The best
examples are some of the "zombie" type facebook apps that are pretty much just
pure virality.

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mikeryan
I agree w/r/t to the facebook apps - I don't think they have any lasting
value.

And I think any product that completely revolutionizes a domain doesn't need
to "go viral" to succeed - ultimately the excellence or game changing
experience will cause these apps to succeed, Amazon, and the iPod are two
great examples. Google was a success because they created a game changing
search product - it was (and still is) vastly better then anything else out
there.

I think however that while everyone tries to create a game changing product,
the vast majority of products are really incremental improvements and in these
cases going viral helps. Twitter being a great case in point - really just an
iteration somewhere between IM/Email/Blogging - but went viral enough to be
important, over some better platforms such as Jaiku.

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adamhowell
Weird to see a "Top 5" list from the same guy who said "Limited Life
Experiences + Overgeneralization = Advice"

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AndrewWarner
To be fair to Paul, I should say that the list of 5 isn't his top ideas. It's
just 5 ideas that he told me in when we talked.

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goodkarma
Oh my gosh, how annoying is the video at the bottom? I was hoping to just see
the interview with Paul, not a sliced and diced version that screetches like
he's pulling a needle over a record..

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AndrewWarner
Yikes! Alex, I'm still trying to figure out how to sum up long interviews in
short videos. I'll keep at it.

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goodkarma
Sorry I was a bit harsh there. I had really hoped to see the full interview
and got a little frustrated.

Curious.. do you have the original (full-length) interview video? Would you
mind posting it somewhere?

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AndrewWarner
Nah. I appreciate the feedback. I'm uploading the full video to Vimeo. Will
post a link here when it's done.

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sam_in_nyc
The hardest part about his first point, "launch a scaled back version first"
is determining what, _exactly_ , that means to your product. For me, it's not
at all a challenge to think of 20 incredible features that would completely
blow away the competition. Does that mean I should only pick 10? What if I'd
though of 50... should I now only pick 25?

I wish he'd talked more about the purpose of scaling back. I'd presume that
it's to save time, and to have something working with which you can improve.
If that's the case, I'd much rather heed the advice of "launch early, launch
often" then "scale back." The most difficult decisions to make, for me at
least, are what features to spend time on. _I consider every version of what I
make scaled back,_ because to me, it's never done.

About his argument for scaling back: "there are people in their garages
building an electric car." What does this prove? It doesn't convince me that
these people in garages are on a better track than Tesla. If, however, one of
these people manages to build a better company than Tesla, based on their
garage-built prototype, then maybe I'd take his point more to heart.

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AndrewWarner
Sam, I think whether you want to launch 20 or 50 or 20,050 features, ideally,
you should launch with just 1.

The questions I have are: how practical is that? and how can you decide with 1
feature to launch first?

I tried asking Paul that in the interview, but it's a tough concept to teach
in an impromptu interview like the one I did.

If anyone has any suggestions for people I can interview about this concept,
I'd love the help.

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unalone
Very cool to see somebody from Mashable writing here - I like when a writer
follows their discussion places.

In writing you get told to focus on a single core idea: a central theme that
you revolve everything else around. It works similarly for web design (or at
least that's the model my cofounder and I are using): you find out what lies
at the heart of your system, what everything else revolves around. Every idea
has one, even complex ideas. You figure out how to create that idea, and in
theory every feature you add should revolve around that central concept.

Sam: your idea is based around commenting, right? What you need to do is
figure out exactly what your big idea is. It's never something vacuous: it's
one specific thing that you think places you above the people who are out
there now. Everything else you do revolves around that core.

(As for people to interview: you could always try the 37signals people, and
I'd also recommend the contrast.ie team: They have a very good sense of how to
focus a concept.)

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AndrewWarner
I live on this site. I've done several interviews on Mixergy.com because of
what I've read here. Thanks for the feedback.

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AndrewWarner
Here's the whole (unedited) interview: <http://www.vimeo.com/3368761>

