Category Archives: Success Factors

General writings on building a successful business.

Friction

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Friction

Justin Williams talks about the friction of using an app. Pretty well written. Here’s an excerpt:

Here’s what happens when I download a new application from any app store.

  1. I launch the app and judge how long it takes to let me see content.
  2. I look at the user interface to gauge how I will respond to it.
  3. I tap around to see what functionality is in there.
  4. I create data.
  5. I delete newly created data.
  6. I invite my friends to join if it’s one of those new social networks and I like it.

If at any point in that process I see a crash, frustrating design decisions, confusing experiences or perceive a lack of functionality, I delete the app and go on with my day. Put more succinctly, if at any point in the first use experience I experience friction, it’s game over.

There is a previous step, though, a Step 0, that is even harder for consumer-oriented applications: paying. I’ve been thinking about that step a lot lately: how do you get consumers to spend money on your app (product) and how do you create marketing with non-social-oriented games without spending a fortune?

It’s an ongoing endeavor.

Disruptive Only In a Rear-View Mirror

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Interesting quote from Clayton Christensen (via Bryce.vc and this presentation):

Not only are the market applications for disruptive technologies unknown at the time of their development, they are unknowable.

A couple of days ago Chris Dixon wrote the following:

New startup ideas are all around you, in the improvised behaviors of people you know. It takes a keen product eye, however, to notice these improvisational behaviors and recognize which ones are worthy of being developed into standalone products.

He referenced how Instagram, which had both filters and sharing, ate Hipstamatic’s lunch, which only had filters.

Dixon’s comment, though, suffers from hindsight and surviver’s bias. We only know Instagram is more popular because we know Instagram is more popular. Rewind a year or so and who really knows what the outcome will be.

To paraphrase Christensen, no one can know whether the technology will be disruptive before it is.

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UPDATE: I suggest reading the comments. Andy and I have a pretty good conversation there that extends the post nicely.

Who’s Your Daddy and What’s Your Killer Feature?

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Why Web OS Really Failed, and What it Means for the Rest of Us

Michael Mace dug into the webOS story, too, today with another excellent post. We kind of said the same thing. Mace said it was because there were no deep pockets to fix the flaws and no killer feature to get anyone interested. I contend that webOS would have looked innovative and killer if Apple hadn’t sucked all the oxygen out of the room before Palm got there.

But that’s not why I am writing this. I am writing this because Mace’s comment — who’s your daddy and what’s your killer feature — is profound for any company writing a platform product (OS or otherwise). His premise is that the inherent trade-offs in version 1.0 ensures that there will be missing features, bugs and performance issues. There is no way around that. The only way to fix that problem is version 2 and 3. The only way to get to version 2 and 3 is time. And having time does you no good if you have no customers.

So the fundamental questions for any platform product is: how do you stick around long enough to fix your flaws and why will anyone use your platform to begin with? Answer those and you have the best chance of being around for an awesome 3.0 launch.

Finding Your Inner Milkshake

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The hiring and firing of milkshakes and candy bars

Horace Dediu is one of the most influential and insightful analysts in the mobile market these days. I just started listening to his podcasts. The one I linked to above is an interview with Bob Moestra, who is executing on a simple Clayton Christensen idea.

The short summary is thus: products are hired to do a job. The key to each successful product is figuring out why the product was hired and then executing product, marketing and sales around that job.

Christensen’s example is one of a fast food chain that found that some customers were buying milkshakes in the a.m. Why? Turned out the commute was long and boring and they wanted something to do. Eating a bagel or sandwich was too messy. Drinking a milkshake kept them busy without risk of a sullied shirt and filled them up until lunch. The milkshake was being hired in the morning to help fill travel time and an empty stomach.

In the tech space one obvious example of a product that has figured out why it is hired is DropBox. DropBox is hired to give access to all my files wherever I am. The folks running DropBox have done a fabulous job engineering all facets of its business around this idea, even with new features like automated scripts for doing stuff on available files. What I admire about the company is that it realized not only what it was being hired to do but also that all the other noise needed to go away. No settings, no special processes, nothing. Just drop it in a file and go.

Even our very own powerOne has a clearly defined job: give you answers to your math and finance questions fast and easy. Believe me, we have tried over the years to expand its job but it has never worked. The product’s job is give a result fast and easy. Everything else is superfluous.

(As an aside this is why companies go astray, I believe, as well. Those developing it forget why it was hired. I also think this is why Siri is beta. It isn’t because it is not feature complete. I think it is because Apple doesn’t quite know what job you are going to hire it for.)

A couple of years ago I went to a TechTalk sponsored by Apple in Seattle. One of the things I took away from there was a distinct phrase that Apple uses for each one of their products:

Your differentiator your solution for your audience

In other words, what job is your product being hired to do by what audience.

Once we figure this out, the rest is staying focused and executing.

2012: Ending the Gatekeepers

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Over at avc.com, Fred Wilson commented that he thinks 2012 will be the year that the movement goes mainstream. He sees five events — Ron Paul’s rise in popularity, Occupy Wall Street, Reddit as an populist building community and a couple of technology things —  as setting us down this course.

While I agree with Fred, I latched on to a comment by Lucas Wilk:

It all ties in with the big theme, the megatrend as you will, which is the end of gatekeeping of just about any kind. Legacy structures based on keeping the information flow from top to bottom are being made obsolete in the areas of broadcasting, publishing, commerce and now mass communications . The world is clearly becoming more horizontal and rapidly decentralized. [italics mine]

I’ve been staring this trend in the face for the past year and have been unable to put a definition around it. I’ve been calling it “when the app comes to you.” In short, our world is changing from one where we go to an app to get things done to one where the app comes to us. In the old days to send an email we would launch an email application, wait for it to appear on the screen, type in the name, subject and body and send it. Now I click a link in an app or web site and an email client launches right within the application I am working within. No switching apps, no splash screens. I do my business and move on.

There have been a number of technologies and apps that have made this “app come to you” possible. To save something to Evernote, I choose an icon on the menu bar of my Mac. To post a tweet to Twitter or save an article to Instapaper, I just choose that option in any number of apps I have on my phone or iPad. To read my articles every day, I don’t go to 200 different web sites. I grab them all in one central location using RSS. Even the web, using technologies like WebKit, now appear in my app explicitly instead of me going to a browser. Siri is just the most recent example of this. Ask it for something and it will try to take care of it, interacting with any number of web sites, apps and services to get that done.

Except calling it “when the app comes to you” isn’t particularly elegant and doesn’t encapsulate what I am seeing. What this really is is the end of gatekeeping. We now expect to interact wherever we are, in whatever context we choose. And that applies for everything: software, hardware, politics, learning, entertainment, sports. You name it we want the gatekeepers banished.

2012 is just the beginning of this movement. But Fred is right. This is the year for it to go mainstream.