First-User Experience: Don’t Forget It, Entrepreneurs

(Note: Scott’s quotes aren’t accurate below, but you get the drift)

I’ve had the pleasure to chat with Scott Rafer (Lookery, Mashery, and formerly MyBlogLog, Feedster) on a few occasions. Quite frankly, the man is brilliant — but not just because of the lesson in this post that he pointed out to me.

I was recently telling him about an idea that I had detailed and conceptualized out quite well — or so I had thought. Just simply speaking about the concepts (and not the monetization which he disagreed on) — “Steve, looks great. As user #1, tell me about the user experience.”

On my side of the phone call was dead silence.

“Steve, looks great — if you had a million users to start with.”

There has to be value to User #1 and then you’ll see User #2 come on board, and so forth. He brought up examples of MyBlogLog and del.icio.us. MyBlogLog gave bloggers stats at first — that was of personal value/utility to them; they used it. Later on, MyBlogLog applied all the social networking features that we’ve come to know/love about MyBlogLog — but that was after they had a bunch of users in their system. Ditto on del.icio.us — online bookmarking was of personal value/utility to users individually. Then once it caught on, the collective keywords/bookmarks across the entire network (with minimal social networking aspects) was of great value to everyone using it.

I’ve tried to tell myself, “Well, OK, I simply require 100 users at least — I’ll get a bunch of friends to sign-up initially to create that necessary pool.” But I don’t think that approach works for this still, because it’s social-oriented and if the users go through the 100 and more users aren’t added fast enough, it’ll be a dead horse that those users won’t ever come back to.

So when you’re mapping out your big startup idea — be sure to think of how User #1 will use it. Then you just might get User #2 and so forth.

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  • http://www.techstbooks.com Colin Dowling

    Solid post. The big issue with many “community” startups is that the value is placed on building a community without any value being placed on the actual members of that community, including the all important first member.

    If a web app is only useful when a bunch of people are gathered around it, then it isn’t really all that useful.

  • http://blog.lookery.com Scott Rafer

    It’s plagiarism on my part — someone else’s lesson I repeated to you. Joshua Shachter’s, I think. Eric and Todd figured out how to get a million people a day cycling through MBL’s reporting before I’d ever heard of them. I just suggested how to best profit from such huge traction.

  • http://www.one-penny-project.blogspot.com BeachBum

    I have almost 7,000 MyBlogLog contacts. It is more important to get people to join your community.

    BB

  • http://blog.jparkhill.com Jay Parkhill

    And here’s where the real challenge of “Nisan’s law of virality” becomes apparent. My co-blogger Nisan Gabbay defined a truly viral application as one that requires users to invite others to get full value. See his post at http://mashable.com/?p=1454

    It’s really a knife-edge: make it too dependent on invites and people may never get enough value to send the invitations, but too standalone-functional and the potential to induce invites starts to drop off.

  • http://breasy.com/blog/ Udi Falkson

    Joshua Porter has a very good essay about this over at bokardo.com

    http://bokardo.com/archives/the-delicious-lesson/

  • http://www.rosshill.com.au Ross Hill

    I think the folks at tumblr must have thought this through, their system is very simple now but lets a person show off their stuff – when will the network effect be unveiled? That recent funding must be helping them on their way.

  • http://blog.lookery.com Scott Rafer

    I picked this thread up with a couple first-time startup guys that I hold in high regard. They’ll crack the code in one or two startups as compared to my screwing up (at least) the first four. My issue is that they are completely focused on local, which I think is self-defeating.

    It brings up a corollary to the discussion above. I think that startups need to remove statistical improbabilities from their models. It’s a different view on the same design criteria as requiring each user to gain immediate and individual gratification. Getting people to send you data is so valuable a starting point that young businesses need to use all they data they receive, not just the beautifully correlated parts. When your volume is low, data distribution is wide/shallow, and overlaps effectively zero, there still needs to be value.

    local with bootstrapping = death