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.)
Well said. This is something that most of us actually start to experience after finishing the development phase and starting to market our products. Sure, everyone knows that marketing is critical, but when it comes time to experience it first hand, it gets you to a deeper level of appreciation for the fact.
Like you said, word of mouth is the best marketing approach if you can achieve it. I can think of three ways to get there:
- Viral Features: The most know examples are social networks and other social Web sites, but there are many others that aren't exactly social but they do have viral features. For example, Paypal. If you want to send money to someone, they'll have to create a Paypal account as well.
- A Well Known Brand: That's obvious. If you're a big company or a well known celebrity in the tech industry everyone will be happy to cover your news. If you don't have a well known brand, then try to associate yourself with someone who does.
- A WOW feature: Anything that amazes people and gets them to tell their friends about your product falls under this category. The first thing that comes to mind is Google Maps. When it first came out it was so amazing that everyone called their friends to show them.
P.S. I'd like to read your essay when you finish it.
(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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.)