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1 - The user interface also plays a big part in this. If the user experience sucks, so will the website.
Gmail, Google, Flickr, YouTube, they all have well thought and engaging interfaces. They let the user do what he/she wants efficiently and also incite the user to tell people about it.
2 - Pioneers have time on their side, a valuable advantage.
3 - We humans have a tendency to choose "one" winner. Number two and number 45 are perceived as almost the same even if number 2 is in fact closest to number 1. If your baseball team got the second place, well he "lost".
I am no expert on success stories (otherwise I´d probably be doing something else right now) but I guess this factors have great relevance to a overnight success.
best regards!
Over the internet, startups make or break much quicker. Almost overnight, as you pointed out. By being the first in a category, a company has a much better chance at being viral than the next one that comes along.
It wouldn't matter how good a social network is if it caters to the students. We already have Facebook for that.
thanks,
Steve
It's tough to do, I'm trying my own crazy idea over at VoteMeRich.com, but It's been a year and the idea hasn't really stuck. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Thanks,
Will
clean interface and great results.
My conclusion: LOts of charisma in your invention !!!!
There are folks like myself building a great brand (Interviews Podcast) and equally compelling content, but are still falling short. What gives when you've seen 70,000 downloads to date, sponsorship interest from Cisco, offers of help from prominent Silicon Valley execs who have failed to keep their word, press coverage, etc.?
It's painful sitting on a nestegg of content which can scale to millions of subscribers in time, but is going nowhere fast because the awareness levels aren't there (yet). It is a frustrating experience, because I'm always thinking of creative ways to expand the visibility of things with little resources to do so.
I actually think, as does Nisan (I assume, based on this piece), that original content doesn't scale. The blogs you mention might have an influence in their niche, but they don't blow up in the way that user-gen sites do.
What I do think works is how they write the URLs - they keywords are all there. Plus, Digg itself has a lot of inbound links (since they are just popular). The combination of both pushes their results higher.
Oh yeah, if you check - Digg is also in the Google Coop Index.
Keep up the good work though Nisan. I came here via www.start-review.com and am a fan of your cases.
Thank you for your feedback. Perhaps original content will have a difficult time scaling, but when I think about 1 billion cell phones having MP3 playback capability by 2010, my eyes widen! :)
I think new media is an exciting space to be in and there's a lot of room to provide compelling content to a large audience. I agree that viral sites such as YouTube are succcessful because of user content, but I still believe there's opportunity for original content, just maybe not on the scale of video sharing sites.
Personally, I can see 1 million unique listeners each month of time-shifted (on-demand) content at some point. There are already some large-scale producers out there such as IT Conversations and the PodTech network. I'm not sure of how they developed their mediums, but they are certainly successful for what they do, if not on a large scale, but good enough to be satisfied.
If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that there are some great folks out there who stand behind the brand I've been building this year. There's some great support, so it's encouraging, as they understand the vision and the approach I've taken to attract visibility to the content.
I think one of the greatest accomplishments thus far was beating the WSJ, NY Times and 100s of other press to interview the co-founders of Webaroo in April. The power, capability, and flexibility of new media content is just amazing when compared to traditional media.
We always hear the surface spiel about big successes - we don't hear about all the behind-the-scenes hard work that went into building that success.
Alex Tew stated actively promoted the million dollar homepage, and after selling $400k worth of ad space, he hired a PR guru. She was the person who helped him get to the million dollar mark.
I think the biggest misconception in any business is the "if you build it, they will come" syndrome. Copycats copy the idea. They don't copy all the back-room hard work.
You hit the nail on the head I am totally frustrated with all my efforts to market my online store www.toughpups.com, I thought that "if i build it they will come" and they really haven't I often sit up at night wondering what is it that I am doing wrong-
Excellent points! Keep in mind though for every YouTube or Facebook, there are nameless thousands of failures. The community as a whole only has the capacity for so many video sharing sites or social networking sites, no matter how viral or organic search optimized you are.
Will
Nisan: Thanks for your feedback. Creating relevant content is important and I believe I've achieved that, so it sounds like I'm on the right path.
Transcribing the podcast has certainly been on my radar, and I hope to achieve that in the coming weeks with an idea to "open source" my podcast's production work -- I'm already seeing great search results with the static bios of the personalities and their companies.
It's funny you mention content syndication. I think most podcast directories fail in this area and I've approached several sources of interest to syndicate the content I've produced thus far. I think such deals could be quite lucrative and will permit the brand to expand further. If you have any ideas on this, I'd love to hear them.
I remember Mark Cuban and his streaming service that was bought by Yahoo. The articles I've read suggested that the "factors" were passion and hard work from two guys w/o deep business experience. They were just like 30,000 other guys with streaming servers, BUT they were lucky. I'm sure connections and timing had something to do with it, but I personally knew 5 other folks trying to do the same thing at the time for similar reasons - experimenting on driving the medium to enhance personal experience, and NOT focusing on a huge payout.
How do these factor in?
Experience = this implies that they have tried and failed a number of times before they hit it big. Or said differently, every time they fail they learn from their experience and make course corrections on their next endeavor, until they finally get all the ingredients exactly right. Nobody ever hits it big on their first try!!!
Existing Network = they already have a network of individuals for whom their good or service caters to. Or said differently, they already have personal connections with individuals who will be their first users / adopters. (This is crucial as the product needs to be honed and refined, and these individuals are more likely to be forgiving.) Look at Digg ... he says it only cost him about $2000, but I'd die to have his "preexisting network / personal contacts" to launch my own startup ... so in reality, the "comprehensive price" of launch was significantly greater than $2000 on a level playing field.
Furthermore, it would seem that individuals who hit it big have a mindset of doing what they do because they love it. Consequently, they put extra time and effort into it because they enjoy what they do. And every once in a while, they come to discover that there is significant "traction / velcro" form individuals within their network, and so they turn their previous "hobby" into a "business."
Contrarily, it seems exponentially more difficult to start out by thinking, "what can I do to make a million dollars," conjure up an idea, and then develop a "business plan" around it and attempt to execute - as this type of situations lacks both "experience" and an "existing network."
In one month, ANARCHY-TV has rocketed from 0 page views to 18,000, not because its viral, but because there is a burning force behind it and because it has something to say. That burning force will do whatever it takes to enhance it to make it viral, to rethink it every day, to employ more Ajax methods in the site, and so on. If you don't have the force, if you don't have a mission, something overwhelming you have to bring to the world and say, then you're better off doing something else, because there is no money in web development. Its an endless ocean of working with layers upon layers of different type of code. CSS, DHTML, XML, Javascript, working with DOM, Perl, PHP, etc.
32. Regarding lucks role in success, take a look at a couple of recent posts I made:
* http://www.alexpooley.com/?p=203
* http://www.alexpooley.com/?p=200
My blogs tag line is, success = ambition * persistence * luck
My definition of network effect is a product or service that inherently gets better the more users it has. Sites like Slide.com and RockYou are viral, but don't have super strong network effects. The experience of creating a slideshow isn't so much better for user number one million than it was for user number one thousand.
There are plenty of sites out there that would benefit from network effects, but lack viral characterisitics. Wikis are perfect examples of this.
Thus, I think your point that sites that demonstrate strong network effects tend to be viral is true. However, people don't spread the word because they recognize the service will be better with network effects. They spread the word so that they can get direct benefit.
Hope that rambling helps some.
Nisan