Ten Rules for Web Startups | Hacker News Reader

Ten Rules for Web Startups

evhead.com

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I hate lists like these and here's why:

#3 contradicts #1

#5 and #6 contradict

#7 and #8 often come into conflict

#4 and #9 are in conflict

lists lead to check mark the box attitude, which is pretty much the opposite of the flexibility that allows new companies to steal users from entrenched players. running a business is a creative endeavor. asking yourself if you did XYZ today is counter productive.

Even without an explicit contradiction, the terms and metrics are so vague that they could really mean anything, according to your interpretation.

the first point here: be narrow is such an overlooked and important idea. Facebook didn't have more than one photo for over 18 months and is now the largest photo sharing site by FAR.

Yes, but it annoys me to read that kind of "overlooked" ideas over and over again and never see the issues discussed by the author.

If Evan Williams tells me to be narrow, maybe he could also tell me how not to be just a tiny feature of some powerful entity's app, waiting to be replaced as soon as my app gets traction.

If Evan Williams tells me to be narrow, maybe he could also tell me how not to be just a tiny feature of some powerful entity's app, waiting to be replaced as soon as my app gets traction.

I sell a strict subset of Microsoft Excel. My strategy for competing with Microsoft Excel is two-fold: first, I'm not Microsoft and second, I don't sell Excel.

Plus, if you'll forgive me one of my hobbyhorses: there is a titanic gulf between your application's feature set and your business. I think as engineers we look at the feature set and see 90% of the value, and naturally assume that something with 100 times the features is 100 times better. I think the truth is that the application itself is closer to 10% of the value, and that huge ginormous feature sets have costs as well as benefits.

One quick example: if you have a very focused vision of your product or users, you can afford to play depth-versus-breadth on marketing to your niche.

Every product will always have a set of intrinsic features; things like usability, aesthetic appeal, performance, efficiency, robustness, etc. When you use a brain-dead functionality checklist approach to development you are almost assured to fail at delivering on the intrinsic featureset, which is often the most important.

In mature industries most of the competition is on these intrinsic aspects, just look at automobiles, furniture, or food.

When Apple initially revealed the first iPod in 2001 there was a considerable amount of initial criticism from the tech savvy community and many people thought it would flop. The critics called it just another MP3 player and pointed out where it lacked seemingly important features that the competition already had. And yet the iPod became one of the most phenomenally successful products of all time, and has played a major role in revolutionizing the way that music is produced, distributed, and listened to. All because Apple is smart enough to know how critical it is to deliver on the intrinsic featureset.

You can take it to extremes though. Twitter is such a narrow simple app. I think they'd probably do well to add features and expand the scope a bit. Sharing videos/pics/urls are things twitter should just implement themselves IMHO. Then we wouldn't have the bizarre situation of bit.ly twitpic, twitvid etc etc Or god forbid extend the character limit from 140.

Ok, so Twitter is basically doing everything wrong in your view, and yet they are tremendously popular. Have you considered the possibility that you are wrong, and they are in fact doing it right, in light of their success, I mean?

Twitter is quite like the emperors new clothes. Lots of 'hip' people talk about how wonderful it is. But when you actually look at what they've done:

  * Create a simple pub sub backend message system
  * Limit it to 140 characters
  * Allow everyone uninhibited API access to it

That's a great public service they've done, but for me, it's not a great business.

They've definitely done a great job at appealing to a certain demographic. However, twitter isn't about engagement. It's not about communication. It's about broadcasting 1->many. It's about producers and consumers. That's IMHO what limits its usefulness.

As a business decision, giving away access to 3rd party developers seems like favoring short term growth well above profit and the future. Most people don't use twitter.com which if I was an investor would be worrying.

Facebook OTOH is far more engaging and compelling in its usefulness. You can quickly paste URLs, images, vids, etc. It's more about communication.

I'm not sure being popular should be the aim of a startup. You can be wildly popular for a year or two, then go out of fashion. The people using Twitter aren't particularly known for their loyalty either.

ya.. correct

You can say the same by clicking on the up arrow right next to the comment. :)

I'm going to have to disagree with just about everything you wrote there...

However, twitter isn't about engagement. It's not about communication. It's about broadcasting 1->many

Why does "communication" only count on a 1 to 1 sense? Furthermore how can we possibly jump to the conclusion that just because it's about broadcasting 1 to many, that it is not about engagement? As a service I find it's engagement has a much longer-tail than that of facebook's. Once you've seen all the pictures, added all the obscure acquaintances, and checked all the relationship updates facebook becomes more of a weekly "check to keep up" service than one of daily engagement. Twitter on the other hand is constantly engaging because it's one and only service is to allow people to bring fresh content/media/insight to many people with one update. There's no dilution of which feature i'm going to use now, or which one i'm going to get good at.

As a business decision, giving away access to 3rd party developers seems like favoring short term growth well above profit and the future

Really? If you realized your main product was this successful communication protocol (pg's words, not mine) you would want to limit it's usage to just your own domain? Your value is in the protocol itself, not where it's being used. If I was an investor, worrying why people don't use twitter.com would fall somewhere between "did i leave the coffee maker on this morning?" and "where did i park my car?".

>> "Your value is in the protocol itself, not where it's being used."

Can you name any open protocols that are profitable businesses? I don't think writers of the email RFC made all that much money out of the email spec :/

The protocol doesn't have to be open for everyone forever. When these feeder companys begin profitting, and when Twitter determines the time is right, they can charge for acess to the protocol.

It won't really matter though.

The 3rd party clients can all just get together and setup their own backend. Most people are using 3rd party clients anyway.

If a few influential people with tons of followers were using twitter client X, and that client decided to stop using the twitter backend, and instead use something else, you'd likely see a mass exodus (As long as the client was good enough and available on multiple platforms etc).

I guess my point is that the valuable bit, the bit people care about, is the client, and who they can access from it. The network, protocol, backend etc, meh.

Nobody is claiming it's a technological marvel, and I certainly didn't mention economics.

I'm just saying that it's kind of strange seeing people say so-and-so is doing essential-thing to successful-product completely wrong.

I mean, maybe, just maybe, part of Twitter's success is due to it being so simple. Due to the 140 character limit, due to the lack of features like image uploading, etc. Maybe, just maybe, the ecosystem that has been built around Twitter — largely due to lack of features — actually plays in their favor?

I just don't see how you can be so sure that everything they're doing is wrong, and they're successful in spite of it, rather than successful because of exactly what they are doing.

>> "maybe, just maybe, part of Twitter's success is due to it being so simple. Due to the 140 character limit, due to the lack of features like image uploading, etc."

Oh I absolutely agree. But I'm not sure that's sustainable. Where do twitter go next? They've effectively said "We're all about one thing, and no extra features." How can they move forward from that? Also as I've said before, fashions change. How soon until twitter is 'so totally last decade'.

They added lists not too long ago, and they added native support for retweeting while at the same time making it even simpler.

Twitter aren't limited by your inability to imagine where they can go next. If anything, their limited feature set gives them more options on what to do next, rather than fewer.

Exactly what success are you referring to?

My understanding is that their income is derived from a couple big partnerships. Their partners control their profitability. In a publicly traded company, this would be considered an unacceptable risk.

If they mitigate that risk, then I would agree that they succeeded. Until then, they are a high-risk venture with a shaky income stream.

They are tremendously popular, but considering they're hemorrhaging money and they don't appear to have the slightest idea how to make any money off that popularity... yeah, I think it's highly probable they're doing everything wrong.

I thought they were pro-forma profitable in 2009. I think your comment may be a bit knee-jerk.

Depends if you count "here! have a few million on us" from GOOG+MSFT. Is that sustainable? Is it not slightly risky?

Is a company that just perpetually gets more investment money 'profitable'? I guess in strict terms if you can convince people to give you money like that, then yes. But it can't go on forever.

Here's the part where we start redefining words to prolong the argument. They're either "hemorraging money" or they're "profitable". They can't be both.

[2005]

Who cares, it's great stuff. That's one of the few times that such a 10 items list actually was worth reading, most of the time they are not worth the bits they're stored on.

Agreed. I can't remember the last "10 Things" list that was this worthwhile.

I didn't even realize it was written by Ev until after I read it through.

Pre-Twitter. In some ways that makes it better in my mind.

Yes. There's more opportunity for irony now:

"While it's true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company's ass....design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal)."

also fun:

"Acquisitions are much easier if they're small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go."

Ahem....what's Twitter up to now? $1 billion? Hope they get that paypal feature launched soon...

I dont "get" Twitter. Not in any way that I'd put money on, at least. Selling people a product is much more predictable than playing the attention economy game, let alone creating a social network. While he is riding the Twitter growth for now, it is not apparent to me that it is something he should bank on.

I can't imagine Twitter is looking to be acquired.

You know, I don't think I fully understood that one part.

A small valuation is in the interest of the acquirer, but a bigger valuation is in the interest of the startup-to-be-acquired, no? (of course, not too large to the extent that they become too expensive and thus kill the deal)

So it's an optimization problem - you want it to be as big as possible for the startup folks to win $, but small enough that it's easy for the acquirer to justify

so why didn't twitter start charging 6 months in? and it doesn't look like he followed his own advice on staying small

Obviously because they had a different plan.

There is a huge difference between being a medium and selling a product.

well yes, but that's kinda my point, for every one of these "do this if you want success" lists, there are a ton of examples of people doing something completely opposite and still succeeding.

Sure, but as a general list for a general startup this one is as good as it gets because it is both practical and really to the point.

There are exceptions to literally everything, these things apply to 90%+ (I made that up ;)) of the situations that most starter-uppers will find themselves in and may wonder about.

Of course you can't make a list that will guarantee success, if that were possible then that would mean that the competition is over and that everybody can succeed.

But if your competitor has looked at this and you haven't you're probably missing out on at least one thing you wished you had known, and in that sense it is a good list.

As opposed to what usually goes for startup advice it is well above the average.

Rule 9: Be Agile.

#11 (bonus!): Be Wary...Overgeneralized lists of business "rules" are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.

Not sure why Twitter needed to be an exception, but he did mention it.

Odeo had enough cash flow to work on their second idea: Twitter.

According to Cruchbase, Twitter has 83 employees. That is pretty tiny with respect to the number users that they have. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter

83 is masses with respect to what they do. I wonder how many of those employees are 'PR/marketing/bizdev' etc

Interesting to read, although the suggestion that you try a turnkey service is potentially bad advice. Most turnkey services ("we'll be your IT team for you!") suck. They don't care about doing a good job. They care about minimizing effort to maximize their profit. The SLA that you thought would protect you -- that turns out to only refund the money you paid the service for the time you were down. (Most SLAs don't promise to recoup your lost profits.)

mint.com ?

It definitely depends on the types of services you are using. Services like UserVoice/GetSatisfaction, Gmail, Posterous/WordPress blog, etc are a better use of resources than hosting or rolling your own if its not core to your business.

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