Me, Myself and Muziboo

Whats the measure of success for a Web 2.0 venture?

The obvious reason for more and more people to try their hand at entrepreneurship with a web venture is because of the significant decline in hardware costs and the availability of Open source Software these days. That apart theres no real need for an office which greatly brings the overheads down. And a few success stories in the industry definitely pep you up to scratch your itch for the ‘big buck’

But the million dollar question here is how would you want to define success for your venture. Is it always about attracting a million eyeballs to your service and heading for an acquisition? Or bet on the hyped up ad sense revenue stream? (The sad realisation now is none of the Social networks of any kinds will ever make money through ad networks cos people come there to stay and not click ads to hop on to the next website.)

Worse still are this bunch of people who consider VC funding as success by itself. What most fail to realise is that one has every chance of going bust and failing in their attempt to impress the world with their service even after all the millions that they bag. Numerous such VC funded startups hit the dust.

In my opinion there are only two kinds of ventures. The ones that make money and the ones that don’t. If you have service used by millions of people but you still havent figured out a way to make money, but banking on acquisition, its pretty lame. Cos if the acquisition exit does not work, you will die.

When can you make money. Only when people find your service great enough that they consider its worth paying.The most often heard advice from everybody in the circle these days is ‘ Dont worry about revenue models. Concentrate on providing value’. And this often comes from people who have never burnt their fingers with anything. All they do is read a few blogs and preach. How long can a bootstrapped web venture go like this. Especially if you are a media site, with increasing user demands, one has to step aside and think “Am I offering enough value that one day when I make it paid, people will care for my service that they pay and use”

Here are a few of my opinions

1) If you believe in an idea and there are enough stats to let you believe that there is a market for it, don’t validate your idea with too many people. Get yourself to build a prototype. Your users are your best critics. Its tough to translate ideas in your head to people around with just words. Even a basic prototype can turn heads.

2)Dont be different just for the heck of it and dont stick to a niche which just serves an elite. As far as possible keep the consumer base wide.

3)As your service takes shape you should concentrate more on what you can offer that people wouldnt mind paying for.

4)Decide ways to get the word out to people. Do not get carried away with every Tom, dick and Harry’s airy-fairy offline marketing suggestions. Offline marketing and brand building comes with a cost and in the initial stages, spend more time on fine-tuning your service than going offline to increase user base.

5)You will always encounter extremes of opinion about your service. No point getting carried away or getting low for either of these

6)Dont spend too much time on refining your UI. Make sure the colours are comfortable and the navigation is intuitive. Most people find it easy to put your service down on the basis of UI. If they are not users of your service, dont even care hearing them out. If they are users, explain as to why you stuck to a particular design. At the end of the day, people come for your service not for those frills that u managed to add

7)Web 2.0 is only associated with ajax, gradient colors, drop shadows and shiny buttons. They all can go only so far in acquiring or retaining users. Concentrate on providing a service where the content generated by the users means something. If you are running a service just to plot the social graph, its a bit too late. All possible combination of graphs that need to be created are already created by the biggies. Its hightime one banked on the value of the generated content.

8)Try not to run a service which has already failed multiple times elsewhere, especially the US. The US market is a good indicator. Unless you really have something in the local context, its not a great idea.

9)If you are the first of the kind to start something, please look around as to why it doesnt already exist. sometimes some services don’t exist for a reason!

10)Last but not the least, it takes some guts to bootstrap and believe in your idea. Web is not the quick buck as most people perceive it to be. Its a long haul if you are aiming to run a sustainable business. Hence stay put!