Apart from the obvious presence of too much capital and hideous marketing, I reckon it’s a great opportunity for someone else to write about what they learnt.

Here’s what I wrote about what I learnt: http://kristinsavage.com/category/what-i-learnt-from-web-failure/
(5 post series)

:)

I think you can use AskMarkets.com to create your own prediction marketplace.

http://www.askmarkets.com/home

When I refer to Google I’m not talking about their sparse design approach. While that was a talking point at the time and against the norm, it is their execution on their core promise which has propelled them from where they were to where they are today. Everyone has tried the sparse approach (MSN live etc), but simply copying an aesthetic will get you nowhere. Google delivers you the results you want at lightning speed, that’s the company mission and that’s what they execute the best. Ferrit’s mission was to provide consumers new products from a large selection of known retailers from the one spot and clip the ticket. A useful idea, potentially big revenue earner, no stock, fairly simple business – did they execute it though? No. Big fat no.

Absolutely is it not obvious that every start-up should have a blog and twitter account. Those things are not useful for every business out there. The world isn’t made up of 20 something iPhone owners and for most websites, especially small players, converting goals is everything – whether they be purchases, signups etc. Sometimes a blog and a twitter account are noise and distract the user reaching the goal. On the flipside just because a website (Trademe) has survived for 10 years without a blog, twitter or API does it mean it shouldn’t have one? That’s like looking in the rear view mirror all the time and just looking at the analytics and saying “yep everything is a well oiled machine let’s not disturb the ecosystem!”. Trademe has a vocal, active community that would love to get involved more and there are people beating down at the door trying to build apps but the doors have been closed and that community has never been allowed to foster or grow. All they have is a seriously outdated message board). Again, maybe giving the users a better community area would detract from what they should be doing (bidding and selling), but maybe not – maybe they would spend more time on the site in general and attract more people to it. The problem is I haven’t seen anything being tested, so no one knows.

I would argue that the basics, while obvious in hindsight, are not always so clear in advance.

And, when you’re working on a start-up you need to make decisions in advance.

For example…

Trade Me: the idea of charging success fees on auctions wasn’t obvious. The original by-line for Trade Me was: “Buy, Sell, Auctions, FREE”.

Google: choosing a bland home page, with just a search box and a submit button, in order to be fast wasn’t obvious. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that one of the reasons that they “chose” that design was because the guys building it sucked at Photoshop. And, if it were obvious then surely their competitors would have done the same – and at the time they generally did the exact opposite.

Today: is it obvious that a start-up should have a blog (and maybe a twitter account)?

Before you answer, consider that Trade Me has neither.

Ask most people on the street if they Google, they will say yes. Ask them how many times and they wouldn’t have a clue, thousands they might say. How many times has it let them down or given them wrong information? THey probably couldn’t come up with an isolated event. How many times have they gone to google and it’s been down? Or slow? Don’t underestimate these small points. The amount of trust and faith that Google has built up over the last 10 years with the public is what makes them impossible to compete with. Same with Trade Me. It has always been fast, forms dont break, users dont have to think. Go to a competitor site and you’ll see a page take a few more seconds to load up.. fail, go to register and get some buggy error handling that wipes your data.. fail.

People want less pain in their lives. Going to a site A that takes a touch longer to load than Site B is painful, searching on Site A that returns crappy results is painful. If, as a user, I find a site that rewards me by letting me switch my brain off and doing things FOR ME and doing it FAST then that is where I will go. Why wouldn’t I? For instance when that new search engine Cuil launched.. I went there… immediately it was slower, did a search for Cuil itself and it didn’t even come up with their own result. Never went there again. You usually only get one shot with a user, even more so when there are other options available (especially ones you regularly use and have built up 10 years of trust with!).

These are basics and while it seems obvious, it’s amazing how few companies actually make this a core part of their business. Trade Me did, from day one, as did Google. Ferrit did not and they badly needed to. They made small improvements but never got anywhere near there and the damage was too great.

“Isn’t that the definition of angel investing? Or are you talking about doing this for fun rather than profit? In that case I would just bet against every venture and would probably win on average.”

No that would be just for fun. I guess it would be more like a “Do you think the idea is sound and do you think the team could pull if off?” I would have bet for the idea of Ferrit but against the execution. Another example would be Any Circle, an idea that I don’t personally think has merit but a bunch of people might. A smart start-up would then look at this and ask why people thought that way. Sometimes we get to caught up in the project and can’t stand back and take a critical view of what we might be doing wrong or could improve.

I think we’re in furious agreement.

Let me quote a tweet I got from nikz…

“i think the idea of not being able to succeed JUST by working hard depresses me more than your Brian Eno quote”

My response:

“Yup, not JUST but still ONLY”

I think Leonie nailed this one. I for one was most impressed by just how often Trade Me made the right decisions. That simply doesn’t happen in normal organisations. Normally it is a fight just to save the important ones, let alone the relatively small ones.

The incorrect decisions existed, sure (Smaps), but they were almost always changed very quickly when the anticipated response was not forthcoming. Smaps is a good example – when the traffic results after launch were not as good as expected the development and management focus simply shifted to more lucrative areas. Most corporates would have thrown more money and resources to try to make the “great idea” work. Trade Me was small and smart enough to move on.

The poor decisions I did see were overwhelmed by the great ones. Some of those were big, like launching motors then property then jobs, but most were little, like the very flexible internal internet policy and the choice to let Ferrit advertise.

The Ferrit thing seemed to kick a whole new round of ‘I reckon’ and ‘They shoulda’ – often from people I would’ve thought (one would have hoped) knew better.

There is something just yucky going on at the moment around the scene with opinionating and hucksterism and hype.

Nice to have you nail what’s wrong with where people are thinking on this one. A fresh breeze into a stuffy room.

“Maybe we need to set up a group pool where we can ‘bet’ on the success of companies as they launch and see how accurate we are 2 years down the track!”

Isn’t that the definition of angel investing? Or are you talking about doing this for fun rather than profit? In that case I would just bet against every venture and would probably win on average.

@Leonie

“TM probably had countless opportunities to make the wrong decisions…”

That’s a nice way to put it. You are right, although most people probably don’t realise how often TM took the wrong choice. Luckily most of those mistakes were small and we were able to quickly correct.

The good news is that we can put that behind us and focus on the new kids coming through. I’m super excited about zoodle.co.nz which I have been working on (shameless plug) but also a lot of other start-ups that seem t be gaining momentum. Maybe we need to set up a group pool where we can ‘bet’ on the success of companies as they launch and see how accurate we are 2 years down the track!