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And myspace definitely marketed - they handed out stickers to kids at the Warped Tour for instance. Straight across the chasm, under the radar of any web blogosphere (not that it was so robust back then but still), and right into the heart of generation Y. Their product didn't need to rule; they had reached into a market that needed them with a solution that did the trick.
There are tons of potential users that will never see many amazing Web 2.0 applications because they didn't bother to advertise. Such firms essentially wind up providing "proof of concept" for future firms who actually understand the business of marketing. These potential users don't read TechMeme, but that's all you've been socialized to care about if you exist within the blogosphere bubble.
If your product succeeds in the tiny Web2.0geek market, you will tend to focus on that tiny market (even if it goes "viral" it's tiny) while someone else crosses your chasm because they actually know how to talk to mainstream users. Take a great product and actually MARKET it to a new user segment that's much bigger - that is marketing innovation, and it can trump product innovation and it isn't passive as Andreesen's paradigm implies.
It's OK, nothing to cry over, just the natural wash of disruptive innovation, like waves crashing on the shore.
"Humility" as the cure for the illness you describe works fine, but it's harder to achieve when you have lots of smart people.
My personal belief to the cure is "conflict", or, you prefer a better word "diversity". See, if you put a lot of smart people in a room *with* different backgrounds and expertise, conflict will bring balance to deliver the best product.
And I'll go one step further and say that having some not so smart people on your team also adds value. Maybe there is a simple question that all the "smart" people are too afraid to ask.
That's one of the reasons I love to work with women. They absolutely bring a different, unique and valuable perspective to the old "tech boys club".
Timing, being too early or too late is a huge factor. We have all seen or experienced companies that burst onto the scene too early, before the market was ready. Those companies got crushed by "fast followers" who hit the market when it was ready. Likewise, great products that are clearly superior to the market leaders have failed because they were just too late. Brand image took over in the minds of the consumers and a better product didn't matter.
Luck is a key factor in almost any successful company. Folklore revises history and turns that luck into brilliant strategy and foresight. But in reality it was a huge dose of luck. However, the old cliche is true...the harder I work, the luckier I get.
Google had all the elements; great team, great technolgy, a ready market, good timing, and luck. Take out one of the elements and they would not have been as successful. Take out two or three of them and it ends up a failure.
Your point is a good one. Be humble, listen to customers, question your assumptions. Do this with a great team and focused on a big market and your chances of success are much higher.
in particular, i think you're right about a) humility, which hopefuly leads to b) not thinking you know everything about what customers want without watching / measuring a lot.
if you take that approach -- and that's a big if -- then regular iteration will help you find a good solution. on the other hand, if you're not measuring and/or your process for making changes isn't very organized, you could miss finding the thing that customers really like.
in other words, it's not great product, great teams, or great markets that determine success, altho each has its merits. rather, it's an ability for the team to engage with customers, listen/learn/measure what they like, & iterate regularly to see if they can find the groove.
i think i'm just reiterating exactly what you're saying above, altho for me it has a lot to do with the Startup Metrics approach i've been working on with several companies i help. not sure i've got it all figured out, but here's the basic concepts:
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2008/02/sta...
(other versions / media available too, just google 'startup metrics')
good luck with FriendFeed & hope to catchup sometime... Bret is speaking at Graphing Social Patterns in San Diego in a few weeks.
Sometimes the users just don't know what they want, and they need the product design to steer them in directions they didn't even know existed. But aside from that one exception, the rule is that developers have to be humble and view their job as watching and reacting to real-world usage.
The killer usecase for Webjay.org, for example, turned out to be exporting XSPF for third party XSPF widgets to render. This was very different from what I expected when I started on either Webjay or XSPF.
Separately but related to attitudes - it also annoys me when people look at Twitter, and have a condescending attitude towards it for being a simple product, or the fact that it isn't some 'technical' masterpiece. They miss the point. They ignore the fact that the majority of its users love it, the fact that it is gaining traction worldwide, and most importantly that it's growing, and simply focus on the fact that it has downtime occassionally.
Ditto eBay. eBay went down for a whole week once(!) - I think in the run up to their IPO. eBay's success wasn't predicated on their technology though, but the fact that they were good enough for the early traders on the internet and then they exploited network effects. So, hating on eBay for their lack of technology (and Craigslist, come to think of it), just shows that you misunderstand what motivates their users.
"Release Early, Release Often" : http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/...
So part of the innovation is being willing to shift your market and technology until there's a match. And shift your team, if needs be.
> and your product is kind of ugly and broken,
> you can still be very successful, if you just
> build the right product. YouTube and MySpace
> are both fine examples of this.
You imply that MySpace has succeeded despite it being ugly. But what if the opposite was true -- that it succeeded partly precisely *due* to being ugly? Ugly design can lower the barrier sign-up, identification, feeling like "they're one of us and not a big structured company", etc. Many teens like to have crowded room, it's only their parents who tell them to clean up. Perhaps the clutter -- which we traditionally think of as the enemy of usability -- perfectly expresses the clutter in the teen's mind during that stage of growing up.
But I definitely think you hit the nail on your head with the main point. It's not the greatest design that makes a site a win (in fact, sometimes less perfect design can increase identification, see above), it's not the best algorithms behind it (though yes, speed etc. is important), but it's a whole lot about whether the thing is needed in the first place. And users, as you say, will be great feedback for what they want and need and don't need.
(Though not all user feedback should be taken "as is" and implemented of course -- the site also needs to consolidate and balance feature wishes to not be everything to everybody, as that would make it stop being one good thing to most.)
One thing I think is important for site success added to what you describe is the right marketing, though. (With marketing I don't necessarily mean "get out ads". It may also consist of just knowing how to set the right attributes to trigger more word-of-mouth marketing.)
Similarly we can say the same thing for design and the quality of the product : most of the time you can assess the viability of a product only after it has been launched and adopted.
the two most important things for me is :
1. does your product fulfill and go beyond expectations and
2. does it break users' browsing habits .
this is how I measure the success of a product : by its capacity break users habits. Most of the time you can't predict the success well in advance.
I wrote 2 articles along similar lines :
http://blog.myaboo.com/?p=3
http://blog.myaboo.com/?p=4
What you are saying sounds very convincing. And I certainly do not have enough knowledge or information to make any sort of counter-claim.
But what concerns me about this very Googlian attitude of "release early, release often" gradient-following is that I am not always convinced that the function is continuous. What if the function is a step function, instead? What if you can only achieve the next level via some sort of non-intuitive, non user-driven leap? The gradient is fine, if your users are able to provide the gradient. Otherwise, you've got a problem.
A related issue is whether or not there are local maxima in this function that you are following. If you are only following the gradient, then you could wind up at the very top of a very small hill, with nowhere to go. If the size of that hill is close to the size of your globally-optimal hill, you are fine. (If the utility at the top of the hill that you are currently climbing is 0.98, and the utility at the top of the globally-best hill is 1.0, then even if you are on the wrong hill it's not a problem.) However, if the utility of your current hill tops out at 0.4, then following the gradient is going to get you in trouble.
Anyway, your Gmail is very cool. I have one account there. Unfortunately, i kept using my Yahoo Mail. Why? because i can't wait so long just for the email.
Probably this is also a good example of what you have talked in this post. It is not the technology; it is sense and context of usability which matter most.
At least for me ... :)
In addition to user perspectives, it's also good to be aware of the team's capabilities and respect their varying perspectives as you move through the design and development process. Currently our agile process is very much technology driven, not taking into account the equal hands which help bring a product to life.
As you mentioned, you never know where a spark of greatness may materialize. It would be wonderful if Business, Technology, Design, User Research, were equal partners in ideation, sitting side by side at the table of iteration. One day I hope.
What seems insignificant to one expert may open up a golden opportunity for ideation for another. With the merging of roles, and an increasingly multi-disciplinary world, it's really important for us to keep in mind that we're in a collaborative environment where amazing ideas can cross role boundaries. Being open to new ideas within a team as well as to the trends of what our customers want is crucial to the success of a company (internally and externally).
In the end, it's all about the customer, if they aren't satisfied, you don't have a business. It' s not just a tango between technology and business, it's a creative harmony found when all the creative minds are in synchronization to solve user pain points just a few seconds before they realize it, so that when your product is released, they come straight to you and you grab the market first.... and by listening to users (and having folks who don't just do what they users say, but translate user requests into practical solutions), then maybe, you'll have their long term loyalty... until the next internet kid on the block comes along? It's a constant adventure for sure, and that's one of the things that keeps life and product design so interesting!
Thanks for a great read, looking forward to sharing your article with others.
- team
- product
- market
- idea
are just 20% of the equation. 80% is:
- connection and who you know.
been there, seen there, done that.
That's what bacteria do to find nutrients and they for sure don't "know" what they are doing. Good post!
I wonder if gmail could group non-gmailer's email as sweetly as it does all my gmailing friends' mail, but just doesn't because they know that that one feature is so responsible for users enlisting other emailers? oooh. Ah well.
Resistance is futile. They will be assimilated.
YET TO THINK THAT ONE KNOWS
WILL LEAD TO DIFFICULTY
Thanks for the post. New reader, just fed your blog.
Your use of _humility_ rang a cord with me. Thanks for putting into cohesive understanding what is mostly fragmented in the wider community.