

So I built a webapp.  OK, now what? - dvdt

A few buddies and I spent this summer building Facebook apps.  Some of them (in my inevitably biased opinion) are pretty fun.<p>One Facebook App we made lets people overlay mustaches onto their friends' profile pictures.<p>Another Facebook app is for compositing your profile picture into The Daily Show's Rally to Restore Sanity poster.  It shares similarities with Twibbon.<p>We thought both of them had a really good chance of becoming viral; yet neither seem to be.  I'm at a loss as to why.  Is the original concept bad? Did we fail in the execution? Do people just not use Facebook apps anymore? Is "virality" more stochastic than I originally anticipated?<p>More generally, how do you measure the odds of a product gaining lots of traction and users before you actually build it?  I'm sure we all get caught up in our enthusiasm for the projects we are working on; what methods do you use to independently validate your ideas?<p>I apologize for the two differing ideas in this post.  1) If possible, I'd love some feedback on how to make the apps I built better.  2) How about an open discussion on how to validate the worth of your ideas and projects?<p>Links to apps:<p>-Mustaching app: http://apps.facebook.com/youneedamustache<p>-Rally to Restore Sanity in your profile picture:
http://apps.facebook.com/restoresanity
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nithyad
IMHO, the FB app fever among users has considerably died down and also, FB as
a platform itself has over time limited an app's ability to become viral. So
it's not necessarily the idea. It's the timing of the launch. For all that, a
year or 2 back your app could have been a great success. So don't bother too
much about your ability to evaluate an idea. It's all about riding on the next
big trend.

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mgkimsal
The cynic in me would suggest that you didn't get the right influencers to
sneeze this to their groups. In think there's some Seth Godin in there
someplace too.

