Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Brooks — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 21:28:48 -0000

This is an excellent, well thought out article. It contains useful information not the hype usually found on internet success story sites.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Blur — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:11:07 -0000

Excellent article

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Paulo Priess — Thu, 24 May 2007 17:37:55 -0000

Some factors came to my mind after reading your post.. hope I get my idea clearly since English is not my native language...

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 IÂ´d probably be doing something else right now) but I guess this factors have great relevance to a overnight success.

best regards!

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

CRAIG EDELSON — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:43:03 -0000

WE NEED HELP HITTING OUR MARKET.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Nisan Gabbay — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 17:26:22 -0000

Hi Sean,

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

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Sean — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 17:31:24 -0000

Isn't your definitition of viral conflated with what one would call "network effect" - With network effect, the value of the service grows with each additional user. In my opinion, viral has to do with the ability and ease with which something can spread from user to user. Network effect increases the desire to spread the word (from a users perspective). The sites that are viral and grow very fast have strong network effects. Early internet examples would be hotmail and ebay.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Alex Pooley — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 01:54:04 -0000

Excellent article.

32. Regarding lucks role in success, take a look at a couple of recent posts I made:
* http://www.alexpooley.com/?...
* http://www.alexpooley.com/?...

My blogs tag line is, success = ambition * persistence * luck

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

anon — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 17:02:13 -0000

This wouldn't apply to bebo, explain that one based on their reach on alexa. Seems a lot of traffic for the first day...

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Nisan Gabbay — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 02:39:45 -0000

This question about why imitators are not as successful I think has a pretty simple answer - the leaders are able to establish the initial buzz and hence tap into mainstream PR, thereby "super-charging" the viral distribution and reaching the mass consumer much more quickly. In many of the cases there were less successful imitators (Reddit vs. Digg), (Metacafe vs. YouTube), (Bebo/Piczo/others vs. MySpace) ... but none of these secondary players were able to leverage PR quite the same way as the leaders. Furthermore, in many of these cases as the network effects of the leaders begin to kick in, they provide a much more compelling product for consumers and greater value prop for business partners.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Digital Fine Art Fellow — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 21:57:02 -0000

Yeah, if sites like Digg are onto something, why are the imitators not nearly as successful?

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Alejandra — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 20:13:39 -0000

Sure, one of the two must happen. If you use Just Clap you need to tell friends to clap your story to get it published. So at first it will work like viral, as mentioned above. Just Clap has news about the achievements of people or projects that change our World. In that sense people involved in those projects send them and tend to ask their friends to clap them so they get promoted quickly to the first page.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Einstein — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:03:25 -0000

Most websites have no purpose and no soul. Your website should be secondary to a powerful, burning force that drives your life, which will fuel your web war. When I started my site ANARCHY-TV.COM, it was not to make a million bucks, but to strike back at a wicked and corrupt government that yanked me out of my quiet life, ran a slander game on me, for profit, and imprisoned me for two years. I won my appeal, but there is no man more furious than one falsely imprisoned in a concrete steel box against his will who looked through a chainlink fence every day, dying inside just to touch a tree again, to be back on his farm, with his family, and not in some mad noisy artificial hellhole on earth.

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.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

psycholover — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:06:33 -0000

I like the fact that you can base your next big project on one simple thing: providing better access to something that is already done by others. You don't need to devise new product or service, just sit down and try to think what could be simplified around some popular service, something you are using daily and think could be improved. Do sleek interface with great functionality and you are done.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Madhu Pareek — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 13:52:49 -0000

Agree with most of what is in your post. In order to be successful one needs all four ps of marketing. A good Product, a good Price, good Promotion and good physical distribution. Most web services start out with a good product, and great price (free). distribution is not a problem for them, and therefore promotion is all they have to worry about. But for physical products such as ours (tea) its little difficult. When we started Jaya Teas we realized that simply raising the awareness was not going to be enough. So, we set about developing a good product, and put a nice promotional strategy behind our brand. Slowly we are building a name for our brand, and in another few years we hope that it will grow into a self sustaining brand.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Kevin — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 13:09:59 -0000

There could also be services that lie between the two extremes you mentioned (word of mouth vs viral). A service that you could use alone but the experience is much better if you invite your friends. My first thought for this would be something like Microsoft's Xbox live. I can use this service alone and give a favorable referral to my friends. I can also get connected with my friends (both old and new) to further enhance my experience. A more web-relevant example might be Basecamp.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

DavidEzra — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 12:45:44 -0000

It's been my observation that most individuals who make it big have two things going for them - "experience" and an "existing network" ... something that is hard to quantify in dollars and cents.

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."

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

flaschinger — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 12:20:08 -0000

I'd say its a combination of alot of things everyone has already mentioned. You need a good idea, good people, and good execution. Of course, it helps to have a bunch of money and contacts.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

social_marktr — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 11:43:53 -0000

I like to hear people's thoughts on passion and plain dumb luck's role in the overnight success.

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?

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Ronald Lewis — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:38:54 -0000

Shane: Alex Tew is a great success story. He created a new pop-culture ecosystem all on his own.

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.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Will — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:19:21 -0000

Nisan,
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

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Vijay — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:17:19 -0000

Nothing is overnight. Look those people worked towards it so hard. Its only a pain a true Entrepreneur knows.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Nisan Gabbay — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 03:16:08 -0000

Ronald - I think that a podcast content site such as yours can grow, but it is unlikely to attract a mass audience quickly. I think that businesses such as these take time to develop - usually 5+ years. Don't get too frustrated by the fact that you aren't seeing massive growth - comparing yourself to Youtube is not a fair comparison. Keep producing good content that people want, and work hard to secure distribution through syndication deals. You can do a better job today of natural search optimization. I don't understand why podcast sites don't have full text transcripts of the podcast for search indexing purposes.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

toughpups — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 02:50:26 -0000

Shane
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-

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Shane — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 02:29:32 -0000

Execution of a great idea is key.

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.

Re: How to Have an Overnight Internet Success Story

Ronald Lewis — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 02:19:53 -0000

Peter, Phil, and others:

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.