As I've been looking at some of these heavily funded startups, I am often left asking myself - what do they do? Even after five minutes of poking around, it's often such a mess that I still can't figure out how I would explain it to someone else.
37Signals discussed this about Virb.com at the bottom of this post:
I think Virb and our start-up have very similar goals. Except from the beginning we knew we wanted to do few things and do it well; seems like Virb is committing the trademark mistake of packaging in too many functions too quickly.
Would you elaborate on what you mean by "similar goals"?
I'm not a MySpace nor a Virb user, but I'm under the impression that Virb is a "MySpace killer," erring more on the social networking side, rather than music sharing.
If you look at it that way, I would think it makes sense to pack a lot of auxiliary features (blogs, video, music) revolving around a central function (friend tracking). It's like creating an amusement park. After you have people coming in, you put rides here and there. iJigg would be more like an open concert hall. Does that seem right?
If you goto Virb, ~75% of the homepage is dedicated to music. So whatever they may say, I think the idea of Virb originated with music and then they got too mixed up with the fad of packing all the other "web 2.0" features like videos, blogs etc.
Of course I can't be against such features as they are critical to growth but I think the idea of "pack all the features you can" is a bad one and encourages lynching as 37signals folks have pointed out. Instead start small and focused then grow the features. Like facebook.
Certainly there are different strategies for different markets. I believe Facebook is a bit different from Virb; it started with a relatively new niche. In a way it still serves mostly the same niche, except that the niche it attacked proved to be extremely large, popular, and profitable.
If Virb is marketed as a MySpace killer, it's entering crowded arena and cannot escape a feature-by-feature comparison with MySpace. Assuming they are trying to grab defects from MySpace, it seems reasonable to sport a features galore -- as long as MySpace users can feel right at home. If they want blinky text, they got it. Embedded music? Got it. Want more than MySpace? Have more than MySpace. Stuff like that.
That said, I think it's more about being clear about your target market and your product goals. Considering iJigg though, I am not so sure about aiming for a similar userbase is what you meant by "similar goals". The reason I bring this up is because I'm interested in how you are planning the next steps for your product. I'm nobody to give suggestions here, but I would be cautious about aligning myself with Virb if that's what you're talking about.
Only thing Virb and us may share is our love for music.
We're headed towards a system where we can recommend people indie music that they may like. Most of what we do comes from our users(ie. we did a survey last month) so hopefully we shouldn't have a big gap from what we make and what our users want.
37Signals discussed this about Virb.com at the bottom of this post:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/374-designcopy-ups-and-downs-at-virb
Virb's 'About' page:
http://www.virb.com/is
What other sites have you come across where it takes more than a reasonable amount of time to figure out what they do?