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

By: Scott Rafer

Scott Rafer — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:31:39 +0000

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

By: Ross Hill

Ross Hill — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:05:37 +0000

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.

By: Udi Falkson

Udi Falkson — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 05:54:51 +0000

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

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

By: Jay Parkhill

Jay Parkhill — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 23:32:47 +0000

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.

By: BeachBum

BeachBum — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:24:30 +0000

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

By: Scott Rafer

Scott Rafer — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:06:42 +0000

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.

By: Colin Dowling

Colin Dowling — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:39:51 +0000

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.