My current involvement with my company gives me a lot of opportunities to interact with entrepreneurs and CXOs trying to create web-based social software. To set the context for the first time visitor to this blog, Tekriti Software is a premier company from India in the business of creating web-based social software for companies across the world including social networking platforms, facebook and iPhone applications, advanced web 2.0 applications using AJAX / Flex frontend technologies.
In the last 4 years that we have been in this business, I have interacted with not less than few hundred individuals with sustained interest in creating applications and platforms that can be categorized in social software domain. As is always the case, there are individuals who are brilliant when it comes to the ideas and execution plan in this and there are individuals who are in the 'me-too' category with subtle differences from the current ideas / execution and there are individuals who have no clue of what they want to build and are looking for directions.
I thought I will point out the top mistakes that people make while creating web-based social software. The moment a client-vendor relation is established, sometimes these feedback are difficult to digest for the customer and so I am also hoping that this may be a subtler way of giving the same feedback to the customers with whom I come strong while brainstorming on a product idea. :-)
1. Social is the Application: I think all of us have been inundated with invites from multiple social networks, and will be only nauseated on seeing yet another site without a substantial differentiation. One must understand that creating social application is passe, one has to create applications that will have social elements but the application cannot be about these social elements only. Social elements are pretty much a necessity and do not add much of a differential value, but is something that must be there or else it takes away the value around it. So, while creating an application, don't think about creating an application with social elements. Think of a valueable application first, and then add social elements to it for incremental or multiplied values. Social elements are the multipliers, muliplying it to an application with other values summed as zero will only produce zero.
2. Too many features: Please. Before you add more features on the site, please think about the users and the performance. Realize that you can't afford very high end machines with load balancing etc when you are beginning to launch an application. Just settle with something that does what you want it to primarily achieve, and don't add whatever facebook has. You will spend less while the development happens, when the application is hosted and will have happier users. I am, of course, not asking not to add multiple features. When you are small, I am just recommending to add whatever is absolutely required. You will have a lot of luxury to add features after another when you grow bigger and have more resources.
3. Utilizing Ning or any other hosted model: Building your application on the top of Ning or any other hosted platform is a great way to get an initial feeling of the product cost-effectively but that is never meant for productizing it. It is too limiting in lot of respect and does not give you a chance to react quickly with the user feedback. Remember that the users will not give you multiple options, the competition in the field is just too strong for you to risk it. The suggestion is to very quickly move away from a hosted platform as soon as you have some indication of how the product is shaping up. Remember that your appliction hosted on these online platform are there to convince you, not your users. We also get requests from people wanting to migrate from Ning that we take, but I can't stop thinking that a lot of them come in too late in the cycle for the users to remain interested and take a re-look.
4. Marketing the product after the technology is ready: For most social software applications, the technology though important is a very small component of the business. A class of customers wait to see every bit of the software designed and developed to perfection, before starting to publicly talk about it. That does not bring loyalty in the prospective users. As per the 6-degrees-of-separation rule, one must connect with the "connectors" and that loyalty comes in only when they feel they have added value in that product. It's best to connect with few of them (the well-wishers, of course) and get their feedback by showing the guided demo of the product. These are the people who will create a curiousity amongst others about the product, and will be personally inclined to see the product succeed. Your baby doesn't just remain yours, and this is probably the only situation where a baby with multiple father is a happy scenario.
5. Managing outsourced product development vendor: Not only for social applications but for other applications too, a lot of people make the mistake of treating the application development as an event - which means that they think that this will be "complete" once the initially desired features are built. This is surely a way to kill your idea even before it sees the light of the day. I can understand when a cash-starved or pre-funding stage company goes for a "fixed price" arrangment while working with the outsourcing vendors but the fact is that this works when you have truly defined the scope of the project extremely well. The arrangment works great if one has exactly defined the features one wants to build, which is very difficult to do for a social software. A "monthly retainer" or a "partnership" model extremely well where the customer has great flexibility to control the direction of the implementation and incrementally launch the product.
I will be curious on what others think about the same.
-Ashish Kumar (ashish@tekritisoftware.com)
