10 Things I learned from Web 2.0 Expo
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.