Business 2.0: Leadership Success Secrets

CNN Money portal summed up the business year, asking leaders of leading American companies to talk about the secrets of success . Under the heading "Business 2.0" published opinions of the leaders of media companies, major manufacturers of equipment, etc. We decided to highlight the advice given by the leaders of large Internet projects.

Kevin Rose, the creator of Digg.com , admits that it’s somewhat scary to give your site "at the mercy of" users. “Every day I wonder - what will be on the main page today? It is impossible to guess what the system will give at this time. But such freedom brings more and more people to the site. ” The Digg development team currently employs 17 people. About 4,500 “stories” are revealed on Digg per day.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield explains that a successful project is not just about money. “You need to have self-confident employees, happy customers and reliable suppliers - that’s what you need for a successful project start.”
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Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist , says he spends 40 hours a week working with consumers. "We have a very open, democratic website - and therefore very different people visit it." The users themselves help the creators of the site in the fight against the "bad guys" - because they are also interested in the discussions being conducted culturally. “Trust your customers. Give them the opportunity to act correctly. Costs of service will be reduced - and users will be more loyal to your products. ”

Chris DeWolfe, co-founder of MySpace, encourages social networks to remain social. “The key moment is to remain faithful to our principles,” he says, advising the creators of social services not to focus on trying to sell something to their users.

Brad Garlinhaus, head of communications and community at Yahoo (Brad Garlinghouse), points out that you need to pay attention to what users are most concerned about. “Very often, developers present a fancy widget that will actually be needed by only 1 percent of users. You need to find out what most of your visitors are interested in. ” Yahoo now has 350 million users.

One of the most prominent people of the year - Chad Hurley (Chad Hurley) , one of the creators of YouTube. The advice he gives is clearly derived from his own experience.

1. Test your service thoroughly before dealing with financial issues. Look at the reaction of users before making a PowerPoint presentation and writing a business plan.
2. Do not think that you know all the answers. Listen to the community opinion. We had a lot of ideas. For example, we thought to establish cooperation with eBay and use video materials for auctions, but noticed that none of our users tried to do so. Therefore, we did not begin work on this.
3. Give your partners what they are interested in. An example is our work with music labels. In cooperation with Warner and other companies, we were able to protect the interests of rights holders and create a new market. So now, for example, we can add music to the video that users record during their travels. This gives users the ability to do what they want - legally.

Sergey Brin (Sergey Brin), one of the founders of Google , argues that success is in simplicity. “Technologies are becoming more complex, but ease of use is what attracts users to Google products. We focus on working on the capabilities of the services, not on the number of these services. When creating a new product, we first of all think about whether it will solve the tasks that we have already set. We are not interested in having 20 different services that will work in 20 different ways. ”

All these people participate in the work of well-known network resources, many of whom we use every day. Their opinion is to listen. So when you start a new project, just re-read this article.