Comment by Tawheed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tawheed | Hacker News Reader

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I'm really confused about their product positioning. Ning was a white-labelled social network, what good will a "simple blog" do to its users?

Similarly, Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform -- people are on it because they precisely DO NOT want a full blog. I remember Posterous founders specifically saying they don't want to be compared because Posterous is not that (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680087), why go after these people now?

Wordpress? So far, all they've been doing are incorporating features that Wordpress already has and not really changing the experience all that much either... which then begs the question, what's the big goal and how is it different?

It seems to me that their moves align with getting on AS MANY USERS AS POSSIBLE -- and if that means attacking all peripherally similar services, then so be it. It seems that their only goal is a large exit due to a large user base, not really product vision.

I see a couple of takeaways here for fellow hackers and Posterous:

- Really think about what your product is and what your big vision is. Are you really just creating yet another Wordpress.com?

- Is it the post by email that is the uniquely awesome thing about Posterous? Someone should put together a universal "Post by Email" service and test this theory. Have it connect to Wordpress.com and Tumblr and see if people buy.

this might imply their original concept of blogging via email had too small a market, and they needed to expand to be more general purpose?

I can think of better strategies for attacking the blogging market. Instead of creating a generic blogging system that just copies Wordpress' features, create the "starter" blog for a set of verticals.

Create a 'starter' blog that has the right bells and whistles for each of these individual targets:

1. A startup looking to promote their story (have it pre-set with a "About Us" page, a sidebar section to explain their product(s) and what they do, and Twitter/Like buttons to promote the posts

2. An author looking to promote his/her (e)book. Have an "About the Author" section, have excerpts/reviews on the sidebar, and a way to profile sample chapters as blog entries along with a super easy big call to action for buying the book from amazon.

3. A small business trying to attract locals. Have a clear display on the sidebar for location, maps, hours, and phone number. Have a section showing off pictures of the business. Have custom post types for Sales, Events, and special SEO sauce optimized for the given zip code.

(you get the idea...)

With an offering like this, not only will you solve a real problem (people like these having to create and customize these sites from scratch AND having to figure out what the right things to show are -- even though its well known), you 'll be solving a problem that people are willing to pay for.

Incorporating additional data sets like Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews, etc. would be great for vertical focused systems.

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