Good projects are created by users.
The inVenture Incubator invites all its potential customers to read Paul Buhayt's note , where he quotes and develops the thoughts of Mark Andreessen. Mark argued that for a startup, not a good team or a good product is primarily important, but a good market is one in which there are many potential users, since he “pulls” the right product from the startup. However, Paul focused more on another thesis, albeit related to the market, on the importance of user feedback for the development of the product. In other words, on the mechanism of this very stretching. He gave an example when, in his opinion, the developers of MySpace accidentally provided users with some additional features and got unexpected positive results, which they then “officially” fixed in their service. Proceeding from this, Paul advises to bring the product to the market as quickly as possible, even raw, so that users start promoting amendments to the direction they want as soon as possible. It seems to me that such a shift in emphasis in Paul’s reasoning has a greater practical value for start-ups, since not all of them work in a good market. Perhaps, in this case, sensitive and adjusted feedback will allow even a not very good market to pull the right product out of a startup.
Here I want to "stretch" a little more and expand this topic. For example, following the logic of Paul, the launch of a product on the market as early as possible can be understood more radically - even before the technical implementation as an idea for discussion with potential users. This is hampered by the traditional fears of theft of ideas, which is a separate topic. It was discussed in the startup community, but maybe I will write my own note. Now I wanted to take a closer look at the feedback forms and user participation in the development of services. Participation can be active if users directly formulate their wishes. Or passive, when developers simply analyze the usage statistics of various services offered by them or parts of one service. However, Paul’s MySpace example shows that interesting things can happen in an unforeseen area. In other words, developers are not always able to provide users with a sufficient variety of possibilities for their statistical observations in advance. Perhaps even the creation of a wide “experimental space” is not justified in all projects, especially bearing in mind the need to fictating for startups . However, you can think of the type of services in which the creation of such a space would be an independent task and included in the basic functionality. The logical conclusion would be to provide users with the means of self-development of some things, which probably means their most active participation (user-generated development).
Such an approach takes the consideration of individual projects out of bounds, since helps unlock the potential of entire areas. For example, this was the case with the development of computers and programming languages. Initially, programming in a low-level assembly language made of programmers almost mages and sorcerers — consumers could influence product development only by expressing wishes for developers. Only high-level languages ​​helped to adequately master the fast-growing capabilities of computers, which combined two key factors: 1) proximity to human perception, 2) mini-max principle - using a small set of standard commands, you can make a great variety of all kinds of products that satisfy consumer demand. This turned some of the former consumers into developers and made programming relatively massive.
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In the development of the Internet, similar trends can also be traced. Initially, sites could be done only by programmers. But the latter is still not so much to satisfy all the needs of all users and to reveal the full potential of the network. There were services that made available to almost any average person to create their own website, albeit simplified, in the form of a blog, for example. Now development has come to ensure that users can create already and not simplified sites, their own portals in fact. Thereby, an analogy with the first item mentioned above was revealed - the creation of websites has become closer to the capabilities of the mass consumer. Not only the creation of sites, the active participation of users in various "social" services in general became the basis of the ideology of Web 2.0. However, the analogy with the second point, the mini-max principle, did not repeat - users do not create projects themselves with the help of the simplest standard toolkit, but rather use “standard projects” consisting of relatively large blocks that define the formats of communication, self-presentation, information flows, commerce etc. - a blog, a forum, a tape, a search engine, an online store ... Of course, these things provide great opportunities for those who can use them to build something unique and interesting, but ny scale enhances both advantages and disadvantages of stereotypical (standard) patterns. On the one hand, they facilitate and accelerate, on the other hand, they limit the space for experiment and development.
To determine the simplest minimum standard tool you need to understand what people usually do on the network and what they can do there in principle. In a network, people communicate with each other and perform operations with content. Moreover, communication takes place mainly through the production of content units, mainly textual, therefore, only content operations are left for consideration. Accordingly, start-up activities on the Internet are essentially two-level programming: at the upper level, social and informational interactions of people are programmed, at the lower level this is expressed in the form of traditional program code. If you make a list of basic “commands” of the upper level, then the lower one can be “sewn up” in them in some way and the end user will not deal with it. Then the analogy with both of the above points will become more direct and accurate.
What kind of operations does similar high-level programming reduce to? I will try to reflect on this in a separate note . Now I will only note that this approach is aimed at quite advanced users of the network who are inclined to satisfy their somewhat unfulfilled needs or ideas by creating their own projects. Of course, this category of people is relatively small, so, perhaps, we have today's emphasis on large-block formats - they are more accessible to the mass user. However, it is likely that, by analogy with the “ UGC pyramid ”, a small group of advanced users can have the greatest impact on the Internet if it has sufficient tools for such an impact. Moreover, both approaches do not exclude each other - we remember that we are talking only about one possible type of services that complements the more traditional approaches.
Here I want to "stretch" a little more and expand this topic. For example, following the logic of Paul, the launch of a product on the market as early as possible can be understood more radically - even before the technical implementation as an idea for discussion with potential users. This is hampered by the traditional fears of theft of ideas, which is a separate topic. It was discussed in the startup community, but maybe I will write my own note. Now I wanted to take a closer look at the feedback forms and user participation in the development of services. Participation can be active if users directly formulate their wishes. Or passive, when developers simply analyze the usage statistics of various services offered by them or parts of one service. However, Paul’s MySpace example shows that interesting things can happen in an unforeseen area. In other words, developers are not always able to provide users with a sufficient variety of possibilities for their statistical observations in advance. Perhaps even the creation of a wide “experimental space” is not justified in all projects, especially bearing in mind the need to fictating for startups . However, you can think of the type of services in which the creation of such a space would be an independent task and included in the basic functionality. The logical conclusion would be to provide users with the means of self-development of some things, which probably means their most active participation (user-generated development).
Such an approach takes the consideration of individual projects out of bounds, since helps unlock the potential of entire areas. For example, this was the case with the development of computers and programming languages. Initially, programming in a low-level assembly language made of programmers almost mages and sorcerers — consumers could influence product development only by expressing wishes for developers. Only high-level languages ​​helped to adequately master the fast-growing capabilities of computers, which combined two key factors: 1) proximity to human perception, 2) mini-max principle - using a small set of standard commands, you can make a great variety of all kinds of products that satisfy consumer demand. This turned some of the former consumers into developers and made programming relatively massive.
')
In the development of the Internet, similar trends can also be traced. Initially, sites could be done only by programmers. But the latter is still not so much to satisfy all the needs of all users and to reveal the full potential of the network. There were services that made available to almost any average person to create their own website, albeit simplified, in the form of a blog, for example. Now development has come to ensure that users can create already and not simplified sites, their own portals in fact. Thereby, an analogy with the first item mentioned above was revealed - the creation of websites has become closer to the capabilities of the mass consumer. Not only the creation of sites, the active participation of users in various "social" services in general became the basis of the ideology of Web 2.0. However, the analogy with the second point, the mini-max principle, did not repeat - users do not create projects themselves with the help of the simplest standard toolkit, but rather use “standard projects” consisting of relatively large blocks that define the formats of communication, self-presentation, information flows, commerce etc. - a blog, a forum, a tape, a search engine, an online store ... Of course, these things provide great opportunities for those who can use them to build something unique and interesting, but ny scale enhances both advantages and disadvantages of stereotypical (standard) patterns. On the one hand, they facilitate and accelerate, on the other hand, they limit the space for experiment and development.
To determine the simplest minimum standard tool you need to understand what people usually do on the network and what they can do there in principle. In a network, people communicate with each other and perform operations with content. Moreover, communication takes place mainly through the production of content units, mainly textual, therefore, only content operations are left for consideration. Accordingly, start-up activities on the Internet are essentially two-level programming: at the upper level, social and informational interactions of people are programmed, at the lower level this is expressed in the form of traditional program code. If you make a list of basic “commands” of the upper level, then the lower one can be “sewn up” in them in some way and the end user will not deal with it. Then the analogy with both of the above points will become more direct and accurate.
What kind of operations does similar high-level programming reduce to? I will try to reflect on this in a separate note . Now I will only note that this approach is aimed at quite advanced users of the network who are inclined to satisfy their somewhat unfulfilled needs or ideas by creating their own projects. Of course, this category of people is relatively small, so, perhaps, we have today's emphasis on large-block formats - they are more accessible to the mass user. However, it is likely that, by analogy with the “ UGC pyramid ”, a small group of advanced users can have the greatest impact on the Internet if it has sufficient tools for such an impact. Moreover, both approaches do not exclude each other - we remember that we are talking only about one possible type of services that complements the more traditional approaches.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/67726/
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