kickfly blog

To everyone visiting our site, kickfly.com - things are going good here. We’re working on a series of updates that will make you happier - things like little bugs in the visuals, etc. And a couple of most requested features as well (drumroll, please).

So please stay tuned…

Also, a very major conference for startups just got back to us with some encouraging tidbit on what we are doing, which has us excited as well.

And as always, send your feedback to info@kickfly.com.

thanks for visiting!

June was a nice month for us.

Everybody, a lot of new stuff is coming out from kickfly. We’ll have the small updates (maintenance, bug fixes, etc.) and then things like more themes (your suggestions please!) and finally, more features that you’re asking for.

Simply put, kickfly 2.0 is coming.. (or maybe more like 1.1 : )

We read every single email that comes in, and it takes some time to figure out priorities, but we *will* get to everything.

Thanks for visiting. Please send your feedback to us (to info@kickfly.com, in case you’re wondering)!

look at: www.kickfly.com/explore/ to see how other users are creating scenes..

the View Counter is back up, so you can see how many times scenes have been looked at!

We’ve been getting useful feedback on bugs/features to add at info@kickfly.com, so please keep on sending email. thanks again!

But we’re getting there…

the next version of kickfly is almost ready to show (private beta).

The current site will be moving to a different URL, something like old.kickfly.com or test.kickfly.com.

We’ve redone everything in the latest version of Flash, new graphics, etc.

Will let you know when it is done!

Just a little update for our fans out there.

Migrating the backend to Amazon EC2.

Re-writing the front-end in pure Flash (no Ajax).

Updating the look and graphics.

It all takes time but we are cranking away.

Stay tuned — !

One of my least favorite words is refactoring. I know it’s necessary to clean up the internals every so often, but a more optimal way would be just to design it right the first time. : )

OK, I’m kidding. It’s not always possible to do that.

I was just reading an excellent old post by Dan Dodge, called Is your product a vitamin or a painkiller?

To sum up, some products are painkillers - you need them to solve a pain point. Others are vitamins, nice to have, but ultimately, not necessary. Triggers are events that make a potential customer feel the pain to have your product. Sometimes, external events can turn vitamins into painkillers. Dan gives the example of Sarbanes-Oxley and compliance software.

So the question for us is, what pain points are we solving, and, are the events on the horizon that will turn us into a guaranteed painkiller?

Of course, we need to finish refactoring first before any of you can see what we’re thinking about!

So I spent some time out at the TieCon show (www.tiecon.org) this past weekend.

It’s billed as the world’s largest trade show for entrepreneurs. The highlights were Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, both ex-Paypalers. Both Peter and Elon are undeniably brilliant. There were some other interesting panels, and the panelists that impressed included Joanne Bradford of SpotRunner, and Dave McClure, Master of 500 Hats (Dave also led a panel at the Web 2.0 Expo).

Peter described his framework for investing. He described it as a combination of two factors: ‘good fundamentals’ + ‘being out of favor’. For example, when he invested in Facebook back in 2003, Friendster had just crashed in burned. So Facebook was not an ‘obviously good’ investment. If something is ‘in favor’ - especially in the Silicon Valley echo chamber, there will likely be too much competition, reducing returns for everyone.

Elon is on his way to going 3 for 3 with his latest ventures - Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity. Terrific stuff.

We’ve been getting a lot of email from new friends that we’ve met at the last couple of trade shows. Before heading out to TieCon this Thursday (at www.tiecon.org ) I thought we’d put down some of our favorite launched (and almost ready to launch) sites.

Acquia - Drupal services. Boy, it’s really needed.
Chictopia - Fashion social network for girls
Okupy - Digg for Frat Boys
Profy - Cool Blogging tool, cool people
Rearden - ok, I think the name’s a bit creepy, but they are really successful
RockYou - Love Jia Shen’s hyper-kinetic presentation style. OK, they are too ‘established’ for this list, but they are real thought leaders in the social network app space.
TheWorldIs - Watch out for this social network.
Triggit - Graphical Adsense Inserter - top voted at the Web 2.0 Expo, nice guys

many more to mention in future posts. Let’s see who makes it..

Something I noticed while out at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco:

There are a lot of smart, accomplished engineers, executives, and entrepreneurs out there.

But in order to really get superstar-credit as a young entrepreneur, I think there is a clear bar:

Start at least 2 companies with exits of at $1 billion. Doing more than one shows that it wasn’t a fluke.

There’s just a handful of entrepreneurs on that list. Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Loudcloud) is getting a lot of credit these days for Ning. Max Levchin (Paypal, Yelp, Slide) also is getting a lot of press. He’ll probably hit the bar. Obviously, Steve Jobs, amongst the older generation, and all the other A-list names that you already know.

Larry and Sergey are undeniably brilliant, but who knows if they had to start from scratch, and if they hadn’t stumbled upon the biggest technology gold mine invented in the last 10 years? I guess reaching a $100+ billion valuation qualifies you for the superstar list, even if you’ve only done one.

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.