

Build and here comes visitors do not work? why is that? - 7media

Does it mean it will not work without VC funding? And do names matter anymore with names such as Reddit and Digg or is it a word with a .com?
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epi0Bauqu
Think about it in terms of a Venn Diagram with building what users want as a
big circle and inside it is a smaller circle labeled success. What you have
noticed is that they don't overlap exactly. What does overlap it exactly is a
profitable customer acquisition process. That is, if you can find a
sustainable advertising channel that has a user acquisition cost less than
your average revenue per user, then you win. If you are very very lucky, this
process could of course be word-of-mouth. But in most other cases you are
going to have to find or engineer a different type of process.

Back to the diagram. In the part of the bigger circle that isn't covered by
the smaller one are unsuccessful startups that built something users wanted,
but still weren't successful. This area can be grouped into traps that
companies can fall into. There are many common ones. For example: (a) building
something people want, but just not from you, e.g. because there are too many
indistinguishable competitors and you don't win the crapshoot; (b) building
something people want, but just enough of them to make a lucrative business;
(c) building something people want, but they want it for free and other
"business models" aren't lucrative enough. There are others too.

I have actually been thinking about this for a while, and am writing an in-
depth essay on it, including approaches to overcoming it. However, while I was
in the middle of it I got side tracked on a new startup idea :). So this is a
preview. The short answer is, in my opinion, don't concentrate on "if you
build it, they will come", but "if you build it, how will they come?"

(And to anyone reading this, I would be interested in feedback on this basic
idea. It would help me make my essay better whenever I finish it.)

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jamongkad
_(a) building something people want, but just not from you, e.g. because there
are too many indistinguishable competitors and you don't win the crapshoot;_

Do you mean you built something people want but you yourself won't bother
using it?

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epi0Bauqu
No, whether you yourself want it doesn't enter into it, although I do agree
with the premise that it is easier to build something people want if you
yourself want it too.

What I meant was that you built something people wanted, but 100 other
startups built it too, and in such a way that they all are indistinguishable
from the user's perspective. In this case, the users may indeed want what you
built, but they just may end up getting it from someone else, i.e. "not from
you."

Generally, I think a reasonable amount of competition actually helps a
startup. But if you are essentially identical to 100 other startups, I think
you have entered into a crap shoot trap. Perhaps a few of the 100 will
ultimately be successful, perhaps none.

The way I look at it, I think it is a real trap when the likes of Yahoo and
Google are falling into it and shutting down services they had previously
created for lack of "traction in the marketplace." If their kind of seed
traffic and press edge can't push them to the forefront, you can bet the
standard marketing plan--submit to press/blogs/whatever and get some buzz with
the early adopting tech-crowd and then raise advertising money to "cross the
chasm" into the mass market--is equivalent to a lottery.

~~~
myoung8
This is true to a certain extent, but on the flipside, Google does have to
optimize. What may be a "bottom-of-the-list" revenue generating opportunity
for them may be a cash cow for a one or two person team.

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cwilbur
No, it means that building the site is not sufficient, no matter how wonderful
it is, and no matter how much people who use it love it -- you also need to
find a way to tell people about it.

One of the most brilliant examples I've seen is ravelry.com -- there's an
existing online community of knitters, and the people behind ravelry.com
invited a few people to test, and gave them invitations to share, much like
gmail did. Shortly thereafter they built a registration queue so that they
could scale up gradually. Word of mouth did the rest, and twenty thousand
people signed up, either for accounts or on the waiting list.

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ivankirigin
"Does it mean it will not work without VC funding?"

No, it means you need to work on some basic marketing. I don't know enough
about this, but the other day at the grocery store I was thinking, "will these
people around me want what I'm building?"

As for names, reddit means you have read it. Digg means you dig it, in the
hipster sense of liking something. They aren't just a name with a dot-com.

But don't waste too much time trying to think of a name -- unless you already
have a product ready.

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garbowza
Interesting take, epi0Bauqu. I think many hackers struggle with this concept
because we are so focused on the creation, that once the product is created we
are not sure what's next. And even if we do know, it oftentimes isn't as
aligned with our core skills as the creation part is.

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7media
okay lets for instance take a blog which I have coded and designed. I need to
make it popular by giving it for free, ofcourse they will have to have their
own servers etc. But what exactly will the users want? will they want their
blog to be very easy to use, yes. will they want their blog to load quickly
and have some and not zillion templates yes. this is the tip of the iceberg,
how will i know what they are looking for exactly, the real reason to choose a
blog.

The only reason I coded and designed my blog is because I was getting tired of
wordpress frequent outages and customization. In the process I learnt php and
various other factors in setting up to get to know people.

