Virality + Good Business Plan

For any Web 2.0 product to be successful, it needs 

• to know how to spread virally and 
• have a good business plan

Recently, a friend of mine sent me an invite to Groupcard.com for signing a birthday card for a common friend of ours. I was pleasantly surprised by the way Groupcard had taken care of these two things. Till date I had seen a number of e-card sites and quite a few sites that send you brithday/anniversary alerts. But Groupcard is a mix of both in the best possible way.

The idea is very simple – You create a e-Card and invite all your friends to sign on it. All of us must have done this a number of times by buying a big Hallmark or Archies card and signing it off with cool messages and good wishes. Just imagine doing that online and the best part is you can not only sign the card, but attach audio, images etc and give it a very personal touch

Virality: Groupcard helps spread the word by asking you to invite all your friends to sign the card. They already have your email id now. Once you visit the site to sign the card, they auto create an account converting you into a registered user. This way not just you, but all your friends are now registered users and Groupcard will remind you on their birthdays (they also have a birthday alert facebook app).

Business Plan: With online card comes the option to print them out. Groupcard provides you with some cool optoins – instant PDF format or a hard copy by mail in the form of Post Card, Wall Poster or Flip Book

Anyways, what I found interesting was that these guys took a very simple idea and converted it into a great product.

Facebook/Open Social App – when is the right time to launch?

Recently a friend of mine launched a facebook application and sent out an invite to all his friends. As a friend, I got curious to see what he had developed and quickly went ahead and installed it. I started playing around with the app to see what it had to offer. To my surprise the app just had a canvas page showing off latest content from his site (daily recipes) All links from the canvas page took me directly to his site. Immediately I had a question to ask – ‘Was this the right time to launch the application?’

For a facebook/opensocial app to succeed, its mandatory for it to have social features. When you interact with an app in some way, your friends come to know (via activity feed) and if they find it interesting they go ahead and start playing with the app as well. When you are developing an app, first question you should ask yourself is – ‘Does this app have atleast 1-2 features that will help spread it virally?’ If the answer is no, you should wait and work towards it. My friend shared the app with all his friends without adding any viral features to it. Needless to say, they must have installed it but may not find an immediate need to come back and visit the app every day or atleast every week.

You just get one change to promote your application and invite your friends to check it out. If you don’t leave a lasting impression in the first shot, you have more or less lost those many valuable users. Even later on if you add viral/social features to the app, these users may not come back. Lesson learned the hard way!

If you are developing an opensocial or facebook application, please learn from this and don’t repeat the same mistake. Yes, its important to get your product out as soon as possible and than iterate over it to make it better, but at times launching too early can turn out to be a bad option.

Bad Economy – boon for Indian startups?

Everyone is talking about how bad the current economic condition is and how its affecting all companies worldwide. Everyday you get to hear about companies laying off people and trying to be cautious and use cash wisely. VCs are either asking their companies to cut costs, shut down or get sold. This makes me wonder – Isn’t this the best time for smart startups in India to leap forward?

Startups in India can operate at a very low cost compared to the ones in US targeting the same audience. Just by using cash wisely they can make a huge difference. In US, startups have to spend a lot of money on office space, lawyers, accountants and specially employee salaries. This is quite cheap in India and at the same time you can hire equally good people (atleast on the Technology side)

VCs investing in Indian startups should not be cautious, but infact should take advantage and do smart investments. They can get a bigger share in the company at a low valuation. When almost all US-based companies have slowed down in innovation and speed, I feel its the right time for indian startups to leap forward and gain ground.

Seminar by Matt Mullenweg – founder of WordPress.com

I attended a very good seminar “The first 100k users are always the hardest” by Matt Mullenweg, the Founder of WordPress.com ( popular open-source blogging software ) today. Following are my notes from his seminar:

• Be a painkiller not a vitamin. Build a product to reduce the users pain. That has a much bigger market share! On an average in US, vitamin revenue is 800m while that of just tylenol is 1.5b )
• Come up with a Tag line for your product – if u cant fit everything in this, than its way too complicated and you need to change somethings
• Concentrate on tiny cool features – details spread the word…sometimes that is exactly what users are looking for…
• How to spread the word without advertising (i asked him this question) – develop what ppl are really looking for, they should love it soo much that they will spread the word on their own. Also interact with users every now and then to see what they want and what they think of your product and find ways to improve
• Support your own product: forward support emails to the whole team. This can help fix bugs faster and come up with ideas at the same time
• Dont listen to what users say all the time But try to find out what them mean (read between the lines). They may not put it in the right way, so dont try to do everything they tell you.
• Speed is very important: one reason why youtube is soo popular is because you are 110% sure that whenever u play a video it will play properly without any hickups…that is what users want, other than that it wont take any one more than a month to create another youtube, speed counts! (same applies to google search and that is why other search engines are not that popular to begin with)
• Ads slow down the system, if it takes longer time to pull the ads, just dont show them but dont compromise on the speed for that (this is google’s approach)
• Be the most passionate user of your own product: at times developers dont even use their own products, try not to do that. Passion drives technology and is imp to get the right things out the right way!
• Feedback link must be easily accessible to end users: WordPress.com had it displayed only for registered users, than they added it in the footer and started getting more feedback emails (though the IQ of the users sending feedback fell down quite a lot! )

Strategy and Competitiveness

Michael E. Porter, director of Harvard’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness just gave this talk: .

“…I have come to the realization after 25 to 30 years that many, if not most, strategic errors come from within. The company does it to itself.”

“The worst error is to compete with your competition on the same things,” Porter said. “That only leads to escalation, which leads to lower prices or higher costs unless the competitor is inept.” Companies should strive to be unique, he added. Managers should be asking, “How can you deliver a unique value to meet an important set of needs for an important set of customers?”

Another mistake managers make is relying on a flawed definition of strategy, said Porter. “‘Strategy’ is a word that gets used in so many ways with so many meanings that” it can end up being meaningless. Often corporate executives will confuse strategy with aspiration. For example, a company that proclaims its strategy is to become a technological leader or to consolidate the industry has not described a strategy, but a goal. “Strategy has to do with what will make you unique,” Porter noted. Companies also make the mistake of confusing strategy with an action, such as a merger or outsourcing. “Is that a strategy? No. It doesn’t tell what unique position you will occupy.”