The next big thing often can't prove itself
The echo effect. Are you using Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Sphere? Hardly a week goes by that the Internet cognoscenti don't declare some new service or tool as the next big thing - and if you're not using it, you're hopelessly behind. But Waltham venture capitalist Mike Hirshland, who spends much of his time in California, says Silicon Valley has created its own echo chamber of blogs, conferences, and podcasts, where early adopters all buzz about the newest site they've discovered.
Silicon Valley's early adopters, like the influencers in any of our country's major power centers (think Wall Street, Hollywood, D.C.) are so consumed with their own echoes in the chamber that they forget there is life outside the chamber. . . . Sure, FriendFeed and Twitter are cool, just as Digg, Flickr and del.icio.us were a couple years ago. All are interesting new services that quickly garnered rabid following amongst the Web 2.0 crowd. And that is worth something. But it does not make them investable, valuable, or in some way important in the real world outside the chamber. In fact, most Web 2.0 darlings anointed in the echo chamber will (and should) end up as smallish acquisitions by a portal, which are great outcomes for the entrepreneur, good outcomes for angel investors, and almost always bad to fair outcomes for VCs.
To me, "valuable" means valuable to the broader market, not just to the echo chamber.
vcmike.wordpress.com
Customers, support thyselves. Mark Lewis, part of a phalanx of bloggers at Hopkinton-based EMC Corp., predicts more customers will be involved in designing new products - and providing support for one another once those products are on the market. Lewis posted some impressions from a recent Fortune magazine conference he attended in Half Moon Bay, Calif.
I was particularly impressed by a factoid from Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit. The company recently incorporated their online support tool directly into their product, giving customers access to all support questions.
As is turns out, Intuit customers now answer some 40 percent of support questions (at the same or higher accuracy rate than their own support team).
More and more our customers will play a greater role in not only shaping our products, but helping us throughout the innovation and design process, even to the point of engaging directly in design and support elements.
To do this, companies will need to leverage many of the social collaboration technologies that exist on the web today. . . . I believe that the most successful companies will be those that build the largest "virtual teams." As with social networks, where their value is based upon getting a critical-mass of members, a company's success will be more and more based on the size of their virtual team.
marksblog.emc.com
Letting the launch date slip. Bijan Sabet has some advice for entrepreneurs of all stripes: launch first, enhance later. Sabet, a venture capitalist with Spark Capital in Boston, sang the praises of iteration in his blog recently.
"Market windows don't move."
A wise friend of mine told me this years ago, and I will never forget it.
The idea is that if your product release slips in a meaningful way, you will need to think about whether that release (functionality, updates) is still compelling at the time of release given the market window and opportunity. It may be better to ship with something sooner that isn't as great and add the features or functionality later.
Sometimes companies will try to solve the product delay by adding a ton of features and pushing the delivery date out even later.
That usually doesn't work out too well and usually there is another delay, which compounds the situation. Why?
Because market windows don't move.
The exception to this rule is if you are creating a new market from whole cloth. Then you are making the rules.
bijansabet.com
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