We’ve been busy over the summer, with the kids out of school and the team focused on a new release. One thing I’ve learnt as an entrepreneur is “hitting it” is like making  a good cocktail, trial and error. You have to keep working the ingredients till it feels right to you. Today I feel right about what we are doing. 

In building out our new version we’ve taken a lot of ingredients into consideration. Here’s a few that spring to mind, not in any particular order. Some are related to our model but most are general good tips.

 User behavior: Very few companies succeed by changing user behavior, unless their solution is so superior to anything else out there. So if possible you need to leverage some current behavior.  

 Monetization: There are many successful companies out there that do not make money or did not make money in their early days. Some do or did not even have an idea on how they were going to monetize their offerings.  Venture money will only take you so far, so if you cannot sell your company you need to be able to monetize your service to give you a runway to an exit.It’s OK not to make money in the early days but you must have a path towards that.   

Copyright protection: This has been a contentious issue going back to Google’s issues with the Belgian’s Newspapers and AP’s recent stance towards protection of their content. If you are in the content distribution business you must be able to protect or monetize content producers content for them.

 

Publisher vs. User’s expectations: Many publishers, historically have had an unwavering objective to not make it easy for users to view content from other sites nor navigate away. Any solution that does not focus on this is viewed with skepticism. I’m glad to say I see that changing, since Publisher have begun to realize it’s not about what they want but what users want. 

Social: It’s pretty obvious we are social animals; the internet has put a punctuation mark on that. Social/Community needs to be built into the solution.  

Viral: I think of viral in two ways, firstly, getting your users to market the solution to their friends, great way to build a user base. Secondly, to ensure users return again and again and continue to add to their network. Ideally this should be baked into the solution.  

Common theme: For users, analysts, media, employees etc to understand and articulate your solution, it’s got to follow a theme that they can relate to. i.e. It’s similar to xyz but targeting a different audience. 

Partnerships: A great way to expand a service quickly is to develop partnerships with existing services that could have their offerings enhanced. There is nothing like leveraging someone else’s user base. 

Expectations: You’ve been working on something for months or  years and think it’s the coolest thing since draft beer, so you think everyone else will be jumping up and down. The launch is the start of the race. What you’ve been doing to date is preparing for the race. So keeping an even keel through good press, poor user adoption, bugs and good investor meetings is key. Otherwise you’ll be on an emotional roller coaster.

So we think we have many of the ingredients in place. We are looking forward to sharing our solution with you all in the next few weeks.  Cheers