kickfly blog

On my way back from this year’s (2008) Spring Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It was really great to see the energy from the dozens of startups out there. The trade show floor had more of an ‘enterprise’ feel than a ‘consumer’ feel.

It was really good to get out here, being a native New Yorker.

Here’s some (obvious) things I noticed - reminded of again.

1. The people out here live and breathe Web 2.0. By the time you read about a development on a blog like TechCrunch, they’ve already been working and buzzing about it for 9 months ahead of time. It feels like we really are about a year behind in New York City, and that’s not a good thing for startups.

2. People are still pretty optimistic, recession be damned. Hope springs eternal.

3. The few Web 2.0 companies that have achieved scale like Slide and RockYou are going to be hard if not impossible to catch. There’s a lot under the hood that they’ve learned over the last year, from how to iterate a FB app quickly and get it out and virally tune it. How to monetize their widget networks. They’re on the cutting edge, iterating fast, and constantly innovating. Hard, if not impossible, for a new competitor to beat. Congratulations.

4. OpenSocial is really trying. FB is the leading social app platform. OpenSocial, I hope, will make an impact. Nice guys from Google evangelizing it.

5. Some people are bitter about FB platform - there are some winners and losers, and some unhappy people. The FB platform is a year old now, and hard for a newcomer to hit the top 100 apps. It’s possible, but it takes some luck and a lot of intuition and experience with building an app.

6. The way to succeed is with velocity. There’s no substitute. The best startup companies are the fastest. By being first to market, and iterating, the applications get better, and the company know-how gets beter. The company learns how to develop for a new market.

7. Development methodologies for consumer-facing Web apps emphasize customer feedback, rapid iteration, and metrics. RockYou claims 15 releases a day. Slide and Dave McClure both emphasized metrics in their talks - tracking conversion rates, viral coefficients, A/B testing. If you are developing features ‘in a vacuum’ then you run the risk of being irrelevant to the target market.

8. Let amount of time dictate feature set, not the reverse. So start with a time budget, and force your engineering team to prioritize the single most important feature to implement. Have a 2 day budget for a new Facebook app.

9. Use AdWords to drive traffic. If you have a viral app, that will be enough to seed the traffic.

10. This is a winner take all marketplace. You’ve got to be the top dog, and/or possibly survive at second place. There are no crumbs for the third place winner. This is why it’s good to fail quickly, and move on to a market where you can be a first place winner.

I’ll publish another top 10 list later.

Traction is the ‘it’ word for startups.

I think we’re going to get a lot of traction. We’re just getting started. Hopefully I’m right.

It will also be clear if we’re not getting traction, and then, the thing to figure out is why?

I encourage all my loyal blog readers (you know who you are) to contribute some comments.

(temporarily removed to prevent alcoholism… )

note to all — we decided to call it an alpha after all - see the logo we used. That being said, we’ll go into some type of limited beta by early June 2008. The moniker ‘beta’ would have understated the amount of work we have left to do before an actual launch, as the product neither looks as good as we need it to, nor does it work as well as we need it.

ladies and gentlemen…

after many long, hard, arduous months of development….

we are pleased to announce….

kickfly alpha preview release!

Seriously, why are we calling it a preview? Because it is *not* any type of public launch of our site. But we wanted to get our fans, friends, and other people in our network a chance to try out what we’ve been working on, and get some early feedback. So please sign up, give us your feedback at forum.kickfly.com, and start making cool 3D stuff.

Once we’ve gotten enough feedback, we’ll implement changes - there’s going to be a lot of stuff to change and work on. So your feedback is always valued!

At some point in the near future (we’re now thinking September) - we’ll have an official beta launch. So this preview is just an opportunity to get some feedback and so what we can improve. In the meantime, enjoy, we have a lot more going on that we’re looking forward to showing you.

BTW - if there are any potential business development partners out there - when you hear about us, see our stuff and you like it, please let us know by sending an email to info@kickfly.com. We’ll be happy to hear what you’re thinking about.

We have a little discussion going on right now about whether to call what we have ‘alpha’ or ‘beta’. It’s clear that a lot’s going to change in the next 2 months - but we also have code that doesn’t crash and seems to work pretty well.

So - what’s better from a marketing perspective? alpha or beta? We don’t want to scare people off with ‘alpha’, but we also don’t want to let people think that this service is close to being done with ‘beta’.

I actually think ‘beta’ will win. We’ll see…

Development is non-linear - just because we spend time on something doesn’t mean that the ‘visible’ results are improving in direct proportion.

We had a tough week. It’s now 4:30am. But it looks like we are on target to have a build on our production site. We had to do some ‘clean up’ on our build.

Again, it’s interesting how there are always more things to fix to get an app to a decent level to show other people.  And if they think it sucks, well, then there’s even more to do!