Web Strategy

Resegment If You Aren’t In The Top Three Don’t bullshit yourself about this. I’ve been the investor in many companies who weren’t in the top three that were going to get there with the next release, or a new sales VP, or something exogenous that would happen to the existing market leaders, or a magic trick that no one had thought of yet. This is almost always a losing strategy. Don’t count on luck. Resegment.

Two other illustrations of the success of this layering approach are provided by two of the most successful growth companies of the past decade: Apple and Amazon. Steve Jobs and the Apple team relentlessly added new layers at Apple that sat on top of their original core business of computers, including the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad. And Amazon in recent years has innovated incredibly skillfully beyond their core physical merchandise business, adding layers such as Prime, digital goods, Amazon Web Services and the Kindle and now Fire digital devices. These very large companies demonstrated explosive growth pretty much entirely through brilliant innovation. A Recipe for Growth: Adding Layers to the Cake // Jeff Jordan

In the last few years since that post we've seen an explosion in the use Web services and apps by everyday people -- with arguably Facebook leading the way. Chris Dixon just called where we are today an internet of people . We're at a point now where I see the 1,000 true fan concept regularly applying to startups, albeit a few orders of magnitude higher (depending on whether it is consumer or business). Now it is relatively common for a startup to get 1,000,000 true fans and be both nicely profitable and relatively low profile. A few years ago Kevin Kelly wrote a post called 1,000 true fans , in which he argued an artist "needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living," and using the power of the Internet it is possible to do so independently. We would have that conversation over and over again about, alright, no one is going to buy shoes without trying them on. One million true fans - Gabriel Weinberg's Blog

The Market Size Fallacy « ROBGO.ORG Parting thought #2 – there is at least one company I know today that is reported to be raising a very nice round at a good valuation from terrific investors. Earlier on, many many investors passed, and I think largely because the company didn’t seem to be going after a big opportunity. But they kept plugging away, growing users aggressively to the point that the opportunity they are going after did look pretty big after all.

All joking aside (and #OWS is not a joke ), this is a serious issue for the mobile application market. There have been multiple attempts to build alternative app marketplaces but none of them have developed much traction. For the most part iOS and Android users go to the app stores to discover and download mobile applications. And unless you know what you want, you are shown leaderboards to pick from. A VC: OccupyAppStore

Appstores are a big shift in software distribution. New rules, new game. by PED Oct 27

The thing to do is focus on those who remain, service them incredibly well, and start building from there. Forget about the hot app crowd. They may or may not be back. A VC: After The Hype

A VC: Users First, Brands Second I like simple ways to think about things. Like mobile first, web second . These kinds of constructs work for me. One that I've been using a lot lately to describe what we like and don't like as much is User First, Brands Second. When you are building your product and thinking about your go to market strategy, you need to decide who your first users will be and how they will take your product into the market. You can focus on getting everyday internet users first.

A VC: The Logged Out User (continued) 40% of our active users now don’t tweet, way up from beginning of year. “We’re excited about that. I think that’s super healthy" And the press asked the same question "why do people behave that way? and again Dick used my family in his reply:

This Post Won’t Go Viral | Messy Matters [2] We study six examples. In the first three, we directly observe interpersonal diffusion, whereas in the remainder we infer diffusion from the underlying network of interpersonal connections and the temporal sequence of adoptions. Yahoo! Kindness was a website created by Yahoo!’s philanthropic arm that asked users to create status updates describing acts of kindness they had performed, after which these updates were propagated via Yahoo!

In your head you know that the reality is that bigger companies simply cannot compete effectively on all fronts. What To Do When A Tech Giant Decides To Eat Your Lunch

The mobile first strategy is where the mobile version of your product takes precedence over all other platforms, e.g. A mobile first strategy still needs distribution - Gabriel Weinberg's Blog

This test is very concrete, and also very finicky. By design, terms like “vacation package” score high on this test, whereas “travel experiences” do not, even though an educated entrepreneur or investor might abstractly group them together. Similarly, by design, a person who’s building a “social network for musicians” might be inclined to list the # of musicians in the US as part of their market sizing, but under this test, you’d quickly see that there’s not too many people are specifically looking for that. Also interestingly enough, you’d never say there was a “Photoshop market” but a quick search will show that in fact almost 40 million searches per month on “photoshop,” and it might be a great strategy to position yourself relative to that keyword. When has a consumer startup hit product/market fit? | Andrew Chen (@andrewchen)

Fred Wilson to devs: Expect platform owners to work against you — Tech News and Analysis Now, developers shouldn’t necessarily assume the absolute worst of their platform owners. If they did, very few mobile apps would ever get built. And as I discussed yesterday, many app developers on iOS still feel like there’s plenty of opportunity to differentiate and go deeper than what Apple is offering.

Why Google can’t build Instagram — Scobleizer Google has to pay “strategy taxes.”

The interoperability of social networks Facebook allows users to download their personal information (photos, profile info, etc) but has been fiercely protective of the social graph (you can’t download friends, etc).