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! )

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