Open letter to startups
Good day to all. I apologize for the pretentious name, but it was not possible to formulate in a different way. The fact is that today, as psychologists say, I had an insight. A few questions that have tormented me for a long time have been resolved, and I took it upon myself to share this with the community, believing that this might be useful for startups.
I’ll start with the questions themselves:
1. Why, when you launch an Internet startup, everyone starts asking “Why are you doing this? Who needs it? How will you earn money? ”And the like, and when, for example, you organize an IT company, nobody asks for anything?
2. What makes people a second after the post on Habré about your new project does not deserve to humiliate you in comments and throw mud at your brainchild?
3. Why so few really popular projects appear, because good ideas are enough, well, if not here, then in the world, so why?
4. What is necessary for your project to be popular?
My answers are under the cut.
It would be foolish to argue with the statement that any startup is creativity. And, like all creative people, start-ups painfully perceive any criticism, and everything seemed logical - you do some nonsense that nobody needs, you waste time, and when they start criticizing you, you bite your elbows and blame for an unfair fate. But even if this is all true, what motivates the critics? After all, among them a large percentage of those who are themselves startups !? And why is this not happening in other business areas?
In fact, the answers to all these questions are quite simple. I must say that I was pushed by Seth Godin’s book, The Purple Cow, which I highly recommend to everyone.
')
A few important theses of Godin: 1. The world has changed - people, for the most part, do not seek to expand the list of consumption, people do not need new products and new services, people rarely or very rarely change their preferences. 2. Advertising is dying. People are noticing it less and less (Remember when you last clicked on a banner, or listened to radio advertising?). At best, we do not notice her, at worst - it annoys us. 3. You do not need to make a product for everyone, you need to find those people whom you can make as happy as possible, so that they go and tell everyone that you made them like this (I am sure that each of you has familiar Apple fans (read google, linux, java, bwm)).
Realizing all this, I realized that I could now answer these sick questions for me first.
First, the Internet business is really different from any other in that it is public. Even the weakest startup can easily cut down to 1k users with habraeffect, which is not really a lot for off-line business. So any article, any post (this one too), even sometimes contrary to the wishes of the author, carries advertising overtones. Why is advertising so annoying? Because, firstly, we feel manipulation, and this is a negative emotion, and secondly, because we do not need anything.
We have already chosen everything for ourselves - a blog, a social network, a photo storage service, a torrent tracker, IM, a search engine, a mobile phone, and so on. And we are annoyed by another web designer from the county town of N, because we regard any article about such a project, even in a special place for PR, as an advertisement. Even if something truly unique is being offered, we don’t care. We are quite happy on average.
When we launched GOOZZY (see the article on Habré ), the post immediately hit the main page . It was the same on leprosy. People began to actively ask for invitations, praise and give valuable advice. In short, the successful launch of a closed beta. But that all changed as soon as open competitors appeared. People immediately accused us of starting to make money, that we were using the invites featured nowadays, and everything was done to manipulate. I was very worried about injustice, tried to get involved with these people in a personal, tried to understand why people are so cruel and subject to the herd effect.
And now it's easy for me. Now I understand everything, and perhaps this post will help someone else. It is impossible, simply impossible, to please everyone. You should not even try. There are a huge number of people on the Internet who are not in contact or in classmates who do not know what last.fm is, who do not keep blogs and so on. If Steve Jobs tried to make a new mobile phone for everyone, he would have failed. It is much cheaper and more reliable to make a product that a limited group will like so much that they will start telling all their friends about it. Why .net so strongly pressed java in the enterprise world? Five or seven years ago, no one looked at Microsoft at all when it came to enterprise. And the reason is simple. They simply gave .net to programmers more arguments in the dispute. Now the netbook can out-argue the java programmer, but before it simply could not. Not Microsoft "moves" .net, but programmers, not Apple moves the iphone, but, for example, our sysadmin, who is ready to prove to anyone foaming at the mouth that Apple is cool and everything else is crap. There and google wave and twitter.
Startups, don't listen to skeptics, do what you like, but be aware of who your user is. Do not try to attract as much as possible, it is better to find those who will be ready to praise your project with foaming at the mouth. Listen to what they say to you, but do not take everything to heart, for people are not evil in themselves, but only made their advertising such.
I’ll start with the questions themselves:
1. Why, when you launch an Internet startup, everyone starts asking “Why are you doing this? Who needs it? How will you earn money? ”And the like, and when, for example, you organize an IT company, nobody asks for anything?
2. What makes people a second after the post on Habré about your new project does not deserve to humiliate you in comments and throw mud at your brainchild?
3. Why so few really popular projects appear, because good ideas are enough, well, if not here, then in the world, so why?
4. What is necessary for your project to be popular?
My answers are under the cut.
It would be foolish to argue with the statement that any startup is creativity. And, like all creative people, start-ups painfully perceive any criticism, and everything seemed logical - you do some nonsense that nobody needs, you waste time, and when they start criticizing you, you bite your elbows and blame for an unfair fate. But even if this is all true, what motivates the critics? After all, among them a large percentage of those who are themselves startups !? And why is this not happening in other business areas?
In fact, the answers to all these questions are quite simple. I must say that I was pushed by Seth Godin’s book, The Purple Cow, which I highly recommend to everyone.
')
A few important theses of Godin: 1. The world has changed - people, for the most part, do not seek to expand the list of consumption, people do not need new products and new services, people rarely or very rarely change their preferences. 2. Advertising is dying. People are noticing it less and less (Remember when you last clicked on a banner, or listened to radio advertising?). At best, we do not notice her, at worst - it annoys us. 3. You do not need to make a product for everyone, you need to find those people whom you can make as happy as possible, so that they go and tell everyone that you made them like this (I am sure that each of you has familiar Apple fans (read google, linux, java, bwm)).
Realizing all this, I realized that I could now answer these sick questions for me first.
First, the Internet business is really different from any other in that it is public. Even the weakest startup can easily cut down to 1k users with habraeffect, which is not really a lot for off-line business. So any article, any post (this one too), even sometimes contrary to the wishes of the author, carries advertising overtones. Why is advertising so annoying? Because, firstly, we feel manipulation, and this is a negative emotion, and secondly, because we do not need anything.
We have already chosen everything for ourselves - a blog, a social network, a photo storage service, a torrent tracker, IM, a search engine, a mobile phone, and so on. And we are annoyed by another web designer from the county town of N, because we regard any article about such a project, even in a special place for PR, as an advertisement. Even if something truly unique is being offered, we don’t care. We are quite happy on average.
When we launched GOOZZY (see the article on Habré ), the post immediately hit the main page . It was the same on leprosy. People began to actively ask for invitations, praise and give valuable advice. In short, the successful launch of a closed beta. But that all changed as soon as open competitors appeared. People immediately accused us of starting to make money, that we were using the invites featured nowadays, and everything was done to manipulate. I was very worried about injustice, tried to get involved with these people in a personal, tried to understand why people are so cruel and subject to the herd effect.
And now it's easy for me. Now I understand everything, and perhaps this post will help someone else. It is impossible, simply impossible, to please everyone. You should not even try. There are a huge number of people on the Internet who are not in contact or in classmates who do not know what last.fm is, who do not keep blogs and so on. If Steve Jobs tried to make a new mobile phone for everyone, he would have failed. It is much cheaper and more reliable to make a product that a limited group will like so much that they will start telling all their friends about it. Why .net so strongly pressed java in the enterprise world? Five or seven years ago, no one looked at Microsoft at all when it came to enterprise. And the reason is simple. They simply gave .net to programmers more arguments in the dispute. Now the netbook can out-argue the java programmer, but before it simply could not. Not Microsoft "moves" .net, but programmers, not Apple moves the iphone, but, for example, our sysadmin, who is ready to prove to anyone foaming at the mouth that Apple is cool and everything else is crap. There and google wave and twitter.
Startups, don't listen to skeptics, do what you like, but be aware of who your user is. Do not try to attract as much as possible, it is better to find those who will be ready to praise your project with foaming at the mouth. Listen to what they say to you, but do not take everything to heart, for people are not evil in themselves, but only made their advertising such.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/72875/
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