Last year was quite dynamic, with lots of exciting happenings on the global startup scene. There were a lot of hot startups: some of them are still impressive success stories, while others ended up as epic failures. Nevertheless they all, in one way or another, marked 2011. Now we are at the beginning of 2012 ready for new challenges, new stories, and new lessons to be learned.
In today’s article we share three key lessons recommended by great entrepreneurs and passionate bloggers based on their previous startup experience combined with their great understanding of the latest technology and social media trends. Let’s take a brief look at them.
1. Build products from improvised user behaviors: This is what Chris Dixon advises. He makes a great point here saying that new startup ideas are usually very close to you and what you should look for is the way people around you use products. In fact he claims that their improvised behaviors could be the source of your next big idea. Dixon points out to Instagram as an example of this. He reminds on the “niche communities of “lo-fi” camera enthusiasts who shared photos taken on old cameras that had interesting ways of filtering shots”.
Next, Hipstamatic, an iPhone app, realized this and popularized lo-fi filters, selling over 1 million copies. However, what people were missing was the social feature. Thus they took pictures with Hipstamatic, explains Dixon, and shared them using other apps. “Then came Instagram, which combined lo-fi filters and easy sharing. Instagram has been downloaded 15M times and has apparently crossed over to mainstream users”, writes Dixon. The key point Dixon wants to make here is that Instagram came up with a product that performed the job previously performed by users using multiple products.
The final message here would be: Look around you, analyze users’ improvised behaviors, understand the reason behind that improvisation and then come up with the “next Instagram” idea.
2. Mobile First, Web Second: “Mobile First, Web Second” and “Mobile First, Web Second (continued)” are two articles written by Fred Wilson, articles which according to Mark Suster “were very influential with the startup community”. What both, Wilson and Suster, agree is that for some startup ideas such as Twitter and Foursquare it is definitely essential to develop a mobile app first, and web app second. Why? In short Suster points out to the increased smart phones adoption as strong fact that justifies this thinking, explaining that for “many young people and many people in the developing countries this will be one of their first computing devices”. Some of the reasons behind “mobile first, web second” approach he writes about are the following:
Nevertheless, web apps should not be ignored at all. “I think many recent companies make the mistake of not investing enough in web products, if they invest anything at all. I mostly use Twitter on my mobile devices. But there are some things you just can’t do with mobile app.Try doing proper restaurant research on a mobile device. Try reading a bunch of reviews, checking 5 different restaurants to try and compare the differences. Try writing long reviews of a restaurant,” explains Suster.
Check out Suster’s blog post “Web Second, Mobile First” to read his detailed elaboration on this.
3. Become A Social Media Power User: You came up with the idea, you developed it on the platform(s) you believed are right and what follows next is sharing what you have developed. Becoming a social media power user is one of the biggest challenges you will face. This is especially relevant nowadays when social media seems to change the rules of the game.
“Social networks produce an immense amount of data about what real people like enough to share with their friends. Today, people share 30 billion pieces of contenton Facebook and over 5 billion tweets — about a quarter of which contain links to content — per month. In an industry where knowing what humans like is crucial to success, search engines have figured out — and taken to heart — a delightfully simple mantra: If people share your content, it’s probably pretty good”, writesMashable. Furthermore, Mashable claims that there are some experiments which have shown Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ relevance and impact on regular search results.
“When we go to a search engine, we want to find what we’re looking for, immediately and hassle-free. It’s clear that social media is helping search engines deliver more immediacy and more relevant results. In the long run, this will help SEO-directed businesses focus on what they should be doing: creating content people love”, writes Mashable.
In his excellent blog post, “100 Ways to Become a Twitter Power User”, Neil Patel explains various aspects of becoming a Twitter power user, including why it is important, what tools to use in order to be more effective and efficient, tips that help you generate more retweets, metric tools for power users, “healthy habits” of Twitter power users, and Twitter power users he personally admires.
To sum up, we cannot claim that there is one universal model that every startup needs to follow in order to succeed. In fact we believe in quite the opposite meaning that every startup is its own story, having its own path to success. However these three lessons might be a great guide until you find your own key to success and then share your own rules and lessons. Good luck!!!