Tag Archives: startups

Online News is Broken, or A Brief History of Online News and a Startup That’s Re-inventing It

I am not a news expert. For most of my life, I never cared for the news. So, there are probably details below that are wrong or over-simplified. Consider that a caveat. Once I started working for a startup, news began to have value. It was the only way to learn about a growing industry. And it presented opportunities startups could seize before others became aware of them. So, now I care about the news. The problem is that the news sucks. It really does.

The way we receive and share news online is wrong. But it’s not our fault. All the main ways to receive and share newsworthy content have fundamental flaws. Now, I won’t take this space to rail on blog culture and how it’s a 100 articles a day of recycled press release garbage (I could, but I won’t). Instead, I’ll make the argument that I think we’re all going to have to accept that news is going to be the way it is for some time to come. That is, at a fast and furious pace, without a lot of context, and largely filled with what companies want to get out instead of what they don’t want to get out. As Rocky Agrawal said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Quality news is like luxury airlines. If there was a market for it, it’d already exist.” With acknowledgement of that fact comes responsibility. If not the New York Times or TechCrunch, who is going to provide the context we need to make news more actionable and educational? No, the answer should not be MSNBC or Fox News. The answer is that it has to come from us, the readers.

This makes sense, right? One could argue the internet’s main disruption is its empowerment of the individual. And many individuals do provide context to the news in a way that is meaningful. Popular bloggers provide context to news all the time. In my industry, this certainly happened during the recent tech IPO’s, from Rocky Agrawal’s trashing of Groupon’s IPO in a completely analytical way to Mark Cuban’s defense or Facebook’s IPO to Bill Gurley’s examination of LinkedIn’s successful IPO.

But, as you can probably tell, these kinds of interpretations of key pieces of news are rare, and the exception. Most news gets posted and forgotten without any interpretation at all. Yet, a correct interpretation is where all of the value of news is in a professional context. If you can’t answer “what does this mean to me?”, then it wasn’t worth reading it. Further complicating the problem is the abundance of news and news sources today. What publications and bloggers should you read? Which articles from them? These questions are left up to you to figure out.

Before we dig deeper into the current problem, let’s do an extremely simplified (and in many ways, probably wrong) history of online news…

Online News Phase 1: Professional Curation of Content

In the early web, most people received news from newspaper sites like Chicago Tribune or portals like Yahoo. Content was surfaced to users the same way it was before the internet; an editor decided what was important. Users read what looked interesting, and went on their way. Content contained various levels of depth and context. Some of it was high quality, and some of it was just timely.

Online News Phase 2: Crowd-sourced Content

With the rise of blogging, a technology that existed for years but suddenly exploded in usage with the emergence of easy publishing tools like Blogger in 1999 and WordPress in 2003, editor-curated content suddenly had competition from thousands of non-professional, news-focused blogs, which were focused less on depth of content and more speed of delivery. Portals and news sites needed to adjust and did, using their capabilities to re-work the editorial cycle so that by the time their articles were published, they weren’t already “old news”. Content with more depth and research was de-prioritized. Blogs also provided opportunities for the community comment on stories, but comments stayed at the bottom of blogs and were public, but not easily share-able.

Online News Phase 3: Crowd-sourced Curation

With the rise of so many more potential news sources online, it became harder to find the right content to view. Quickly, the internet responded to this problem. Digg launched in 2004 to help users share and discover the best content. Digg was primarily a vehicle to keep up with the latest and greatest news, and featured a home page that showed the most submitted stories from Digg users. Reddit launched soon after with its mission to be the “front page of the internet”. More news surfaced and was shared than ever before.

Online News Phase 4: Social Networking

Digg and Reddit exploded in popularity among the tech elite, but became closed doors in a way to less savvy internet users. These sites formed tight-knit communities and gamed algorithms to provide certain content an extreme amount of visibility while most content stayed completely hidden. This was great for superstar bloggers in technology and politics, but felt impenetrable for quality writers not as devoted to building networks or writing about the latest technology fads. It also juxtaposed political news with funny internet .gifs, creating a confusing experience for a normal person that lacked direction.

In 2006, Twitter emerged, and combined easy publishing and curation into one format, with some lightweight commenting as well. With only 140 characters max, content was concise and easily digestible. No need to set up a blog. It took seconds to sign up and post. Twitter also easily allowed you to build a network where you could follow other users to see their content and easily comment back and forth. You curate your own feed of users and news, and don’t have to rely on Digg power-users.

Twitter has its problems as well though. With only 140 characters, most news is shared just as a link, with no context at all. This is no better than Digg or Reddit were. Again, a ton of news is shared, but very little is discussed.

Online News Phase 5: Crowd-sourced/Social Context?

So, what’s the next phase for online news? Well, I certainly hope, and will make the argument it will be, crowd-sourced context. Crowd-sourced context means that the meaning of the news and its importance will be derived and examined by its readers, and communicated for everyone else to enjoy in an ongoing conversation. Our immediate reactions to stories should go from our heads to a feedback loop on the news that is immediately shared with others. They should be recorded and contribute to an enhanced understanding of the news and its importance. Enter Quibb. Quibb is a new website where users share what they are reading for work and comment on what their colleagues are reading. It offers an easy way to discuss news with colleagues outside of the traditional blog comment environment, and catalogs all of this into a stream of noteworthy articles for your job. In the future, I can see this being the de facto way people catch up on news in their industry as it’s curated by you and your peers and you get the context for why people think these articles are noteworthy.

Why is crowd-sourced context the future? Well, as described above, the main ways we share and comment on news are broken. Commenting on blogs is something most people won’t do out of some sort of fear, but even if they did, those comments are only heard by people who scroll to the bottom of the page. Unless your peers go to that page, they have no idea you read this article and posted a response. Twitter is broken in another way; it only gives you enough space to really just post the link to an article. You get no context, and no opinion of why the person tweeted it. Digg and Reddit surface the most popular news content, but seem completely impenetrable for non-geeks, and again, lack discussion. Sites focusing on crowd-sourced context can deliver the news that’s important to you, why it’s important, and can make sure your team or your peers read the same thing and can also contribute to why that news is important. Comments could be public or only shared to your network.

Note: Quibb is in invite-only mode, but you can apply for membership via me to get a speedy acceptance.

Be A Silent Killer

Monologue from The Devil’s Advocate (1997), starring Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves (Warning: contains language)

In the business world these days, most startups seem to follow a similar formula to attempt to have success. Every press release will say something about a company’s “millions of downloads” or “10 million users”. Savvy journalists call these “vanity metrics”, in that they make you feel good and on the surface might impress people, but they don’t really mean anything (what metrics do mean something is another blog post entirely, but they usually start with “active”). They’re also easy to manipulate with money. It’s easy to get a million people to buy a $1 gift card if you’re paying them $10 to do it.

On the entrepreneur side, the tactic is typically described as “fake it ’til you make it”. A less suggestive name that still applies if you aren’t faking anything can be called “get hype”. Whatever you call it, it’s almost universally accepted as a good strategy. I don’t necessarily disagree that it can be. But, I think it might be on its last legs as a viable strategy for a growth business. The speed of business today is, well, let’s just say it’s hard to keep up with. The reason entrepreneurs fake it ’til they make is that, like puffery, as much as people know it’s bullshit, the tactic works. Blogs and other media outlets print those stats, potential investors, acquirers, and users read them, and the stories drive sign-ups, fundings, and acquisitions. The problem is that those three groups also can form another group: your future competitors. And, a future competitor adopting your strategy, or, put in a less polite way, cloning you, becomes almost a guarantee. It used to take years for this to happen. Now, it takes weeks.

Now, your little project that may or may not have some traction (and you’re telling everyone it does) becomes a “space”, and, before you know it, you’re in a race. A race where you don’t know what the track looks like, don’t know what the rules are, don’t know if your competitors are running or driving a Ferrari against you, and don’t know what you win if you get to the end first. Sound ridiculous? Well, let’s look at a case of it happening right now.

In my Design and Business Inspirations post, I wrote about Postmates, an on demand service for same say shipping. Postmates, originally a B2B business, was having trouble getting business customers with existing relationships with FedEx, UPS, and the like on board. But, they noticed that affluent San Franciscans were using the app to request food from places that didn’t deliver. They pivoted their service to “Get It Now”, a consumer app to request food or product deliveries from local businesses, delivered by bike messengers looking for extra gigs. They started getting some usage, shot out a bunch of promotions to drive even more usage, and hit the press on May 17th about their successful pivot. They picked up a few more stories from a couple more places, and things were looking good. Investors surely saw these stories. They’re now in a good spot to pitch to investors about a Series A to help launch this in more cities.

If you go back to that original piece of press though, you’ll notice Postmates wasn’t the only company mentioned. Here is way the “get hype” strategy starts to hurt. The press loves to compare. And every company these days, if they’re not already reading the blog your press is in, is monitoring mentions of their brand in press (see my How to Track Your Brand Online post for how). The competitive response happens in record time for Postmates. On June 21st, TaskRabbit launches DeliverNow, a direct competitor. On August 1st, YCombinator-backed Instacart launches for one-hour shipping for groceries. On August 5th, eBay launches eBay Now for same day shipping on all products. On September 6th, Business Insider declares same-day-shipping the next billion-dollar startup opportunity. This all happened in four months. Soon, it’ll start happening even faster. Postmates still has not even raised that Series A yet.

Now, one could make the argument here that this was bound to happen whether Postmates existed or not, and that all this competition actually helps raise their profile (a picture of Postmates’ CEO in sunglasses was the lead picture of that Business Insider article). You may be right. But, I bet it makes fundraising that much harder when every investor asks you how you’re going to compete with TaskRabbit and Instacart and eBay and Amazon and Shutl and numerous others. It’s really hard to tell if hype helped or hurt their chances of success. This is just one example. If you’re a geographic business and go after a “get hype” strategy, prepare for competition to pop up in other areas and countries copying your business before you even get there.

Okay, sorry for the long rant, but it’s needed to show there’s another strategy that Mr. Pacino more than adequately describes in the above video. If, instead of focusing on convincing everyone you’re successful in order to become successful, you actually spend the time doing other things that make you not have to pretend, what can you do? I call companies that do this silent killers, because you don’t know what they’re doing until they’ve already crossed the finish line and you weren’t even in the race. If you’re a silent killer, you can actively not seek press, actively not publish your numbers, drop that PR agency entirely and not alert future competitors as to what you’re up to. This allows you to build a defensible business before anyone knows what you’re doing and get a real headstart on any future competition.

Now, it’s hard for me to describe a good example of this for a current startup (if so, they wouldn’t be very silent now, would they?), but I can tell you about an example from the tech world. The press loves to talk about the tech giants, even though the giants change all the time. First, it was Apple and Microsoft. Then Google and Yahoo. Then Microsoft and Google. Then Apple and Google. Now, Google and Facebook. Facebook used a “get hype” strategy to achieve $100 billion valuations in private markets with many pundits suggesting they would crush Google despite profits a tenth of Google’s. Instead, Facebook’s hype crashed its IPO, and its market cap is over 50% below peak valuations. Every other “get hype” IPO has suffered similar fates (Groupon and Zynga, most notably).

Facebook Stock Performance

Facebook’s stock performance since its IPO (graph courtesy of YCharts)

Meanwhile, two silent killers have thrived. Amazon, which has been around for longer than Google, but until recently, has never been much discussed as a tech giant, wasn’t fighting it out in the press for mind share dominance. Instead, they acted like a silent killer. They had some engineers in South Africa innovate on cloud computing, entering a web services business with entrenched competitors that they totally out-innovated. With a debut in 2006, Amazon Web Services is now a $2 billion business, and one which no traditional web service company has been able to catch up to, despite having been working on web service solutions for tens of years longer than Amazon. Amazon Web Services was a not a “get hype” strategy. In fact, it probably couldn’t be. Most people still have no idea what cloud computing is. And that helps Amazon, because it means not just anyone can copy their strategy, because most don’t even understand it.

Amazon Stock Performance

Amazon’s stock performance since launch of AWS in 2006 (graph courtesy of YCharts)

Another example is LinkedIn. LinkedIn launched as a business social network well before Facebook and grew steadily for years while MySpace and Facebook secured all the headlines. Instead of just growing users via a “get hype” strategy, it grew a business as well. While CareerBuilder and Monster spent billions trying to entice job seekers to post their resumes online for job openings, LinkedIn figured out that network referrals, not application processes, create the best candidates, and built tools for recruiters based on that premise. LinkedIn users gladly gave the company their resumes as content to build their profiles. LinkedIn IPO’s well before Facebook did, and their stock price jumped from a $35 offering to over $100 on the first day. After delivering solid results quarter after quarter, its stock price is at $120, whereas Facebook is down over 50% from its IPO price, and Monster’s stock is down from a peak of $57 to just $8.50. Other silent killer IPO’s have performed well also (examples include Zillow and Palo Alto Networks).

Now, this is not to say that the silent killer approach is for everyone. For example, as much as he may have wanted to, there is no way Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, could have grown Square quietly. There are just too many eyes on him. Nor do I want to imply being a silent killer is a strategy you can pursue forever. Amazon is certainly no longer a silent killer, nor could it stay that way after it disrupted web services with AWS and content distribution with the Kindle. But for most companies, no one cares what you’re up to until you try to make them care. Using hype to make people care is a strategy you should carefully consider the pros and cons of in today’s environment. You may be better off building a silent killer and shocking the world when you’ve already won a multi-billion dollar race no one else knew had started yet.

Before You Try to Win, Figure Out What the Prize Is First

Keep Your Eyes on the PrizeWorking in the startup world, I see a lot of ink written and a lot of who will “win” a market. That is, who will be that one service out of many competitors that eventually has all the users using it vs. any of today’s competition. Every industry in the startup world is assumed to be a winner take all market where “all” is world domination in some form. In some cases, this is true. If a market has strong direct network effects, it can definitely be the case. This is why Google+ is having such a difficult time becoming a legit competitor to Facebook. Facebook accumulated all of the value from direct network effects creating very large switching costs because with all your friends are on it already, and that made it more valuable to you than sites that didn’t have all your friends on it. But very few industries are like this, even in technology. There are many successful sites that have equally as successful competition and many positive components to co-opetition i.e. being friendly with competitors to make sure there is a market. Also, the ability to get out ahead of competitors is much harder with the ease of development and the cloning phenomenon.

I think this logic is flawed in a much more dramatic way than just assuming every new technology space will be winner take all. In the emphasis to win ever-emerging new markets in technology, one of the main questions that is frequently lost is what is the prize in winning. The prize should be profits, but I think many companies are going to realize that’s not necessarily a given. Look at Groupon. I think it’s fairly consensus that it “won” daily deals, but at the cost of winning, they struggle to find any actual profit from it despite 50% margins. Their value is now less than what Google offered to acquire them for. And the “losers” of daily deals are in worse shape. Living Social is bleeding money and trying to get into any other business besides daily deals to find profits. BuyWithMe was liquidated, and Gilt is laying off people left and right.

A similar situation has now emerged with check-ins. Foursquare “won” that market, beating out competition from Gowalla, Loopt, and even Facebook to a certain extent. Sure, it got them a $600 million valuation, but they just pivoted to a local recommendations app (read: Yelp competitor) where its business model comes from paid recommendations by national chains. Not only is this change baffling and frustrating/contradicting for foursquare users, but it is unlikely to be source of profits for its investors as Yelp as a market comparable of $1.2 billion. At best, venture capital investors will double their money, and that “best” is very unlikely. The prize of winning the check-in game seems to be abandoning all the data check-ins create to shill corporate branding to users to used you in the first place to support local businesses.

This emphasis on “winning” can be very dangerous for young companies. First, it creates a rivalry that prevents competitors from learning from and working with each other when necessary. Second, it creates an emphasis of growing a business to build market share instead of to build future profits. Market share doesn’t matter if the market doesn’t have any value. These mistakes can be very hard to recover from, and we have some cautionary tales in the market currently that should remind us to stop harvesting a “winner take all” mentality and start thinking about how to develop your business to make long-term profits.

Design and Business Inspirations: A Reflection on the Remarkable

With the end of the year approaching, I thought I’d take some time to reflect on some of the things that have impressed me this year in design and business.

New Businesses:

Everlane Logo

Everlane is a new startup that sells designer quality clothing for under $100. They premiere a new collection monthly of different types of items. The first month was shirts, the second month ties and bows, etc. They have also featured scarves and backpacks so far. Especially as a man, the ability to find quality clothing at an affordable price can be quite the challenge. Everlane solves the problem by consistently producing quality “basics” every person needs. Everlane has been in a limited launch where it requires you to get others to sign up to get access. This tactic is not without its hiccups as some people have been waiting forever that are early adopters, but it spreads the message and anticipation and continues to motivate even after you are granted access because more friends = more perks. See below.

Everlane Loyalty Program

Postmates Logo

Postmates is an on demand service for couriers. As someone who has the iPhone app, you can request a pickup/delivery, and Postmates sends the orders to couriers that have signed up to receive more business who then can accept or deny the order. This is the classic approach of a two-sided model where a particular industry has idle time and can use more business. At the same time, this service makes it easier for people to find courier services so they can get packages across town without using the post office. Postmates will take a fee from each courier transaction.

OneReceipt Logo

OneReceipt is an online home for all of your receipts. Just sync up your email and have all of your email receipts organized in one place. Snap pictures of offline receipts to add them as well. OneReceipt will itemize and categorize all of your spending and provide reports. Long-term, they will attempt to use your spending to match you to targeted offers. The business model end will be a work in progress as it’s unclear how they will get past deal fatigue or even if what people want from a service that’s telling them how much they spend where to spend more. I had the pleasure of talking with the founders before their beta launch, and they are sharp guys, so they will figure out the right way to monetize. That said, the sync technology is impressive, and something competitor Lemon doesn’t have.

Fab Logo

Fab is a flash sales site for design. Fab has curators that handpick vendors to provide flash sales on the site and their mobile apps. The sales are categorized in such a way that you can immediately tell if it’s something you are interested in or not. You can purchase easily through the site or the app, and the merchandise seems to be of consistently high quality. My experience with Fab has been so nice that it made me think I’ve just been missing out on the whole flash sale scene. So I signed up for some other flash sale sites, and no, Fab is just special. The site and app are so enjoyable to use that I don’t need a daily email to remind me to come back to the site. It is fun to just browse the app if you have a few minutes to waste on the bus ride home. That said, the Fab website has a bit of a confused identity, as part of it is flash sale site and part of it is Pinterest competitor. I also question their ability to scale here as they definitely do not have drop ship relationships with all of their vendors, so inventory and warehousing control is a very important issue for them I imagine. It also needs personalization long-term, and no one’s doing that right yet.

Fab Mobile App

Existing Businesses:

Evernote Logo

It’s hard not be impressed with what Evernote has done this year. The company broke 20 million users and raised a $50 million Series D round that values them at somewhere north of $500 million. That’s only scratching the surface though. They bought their first company Skitch, and then helped it pass 3 million downloads on Android. They also started pursuing a multi-app strategy using the Evernote brand. In addition to Evernote and Skitch, they released Evernote Food and Evernote Hello. By separating these new functions as new apps, they get the benefit of using their brand to promote usage while not having what these apps do become hidden as just one of the many features of the main Evernote app.

Path Logo

Path launched in 2010 as a photo sharing service. Its differentiator was that it was a private network for sharing special moments with those close to you. Well, that value proposition really limited their virality, and photo sharing became a crowded space with an increasingly clear winner with Instagram. Path had already rejected a $100 million acquisition offer from Google, they needed to regroup. Path 2, as it’s been called is more of life a journal than photo album. The most important thing to know about it is that it is beautiful. The mobile app is at the forefront of interaction design, and their home page is even innovative (go check it out right now, seriously). The most impressive parts to me are the + button that is so easy to use the and going to sleep/waking up experience (though it does remind me of a joke from Kicking and Screaming). This update still makes me wonder if Path as a company is just a bunch of talented designers without a real problem to solve, but ever since the relaunch, my Path has been way more active with fellow users, so they are gaining traction.

Counterselling

Working in marketing for a startup in the early days, I was always challenged with building awareness. There were mainly two ways to do that:

1) spend money on awareness advertising initiatives

2) create an environment for awareness

For the former, we identified a few affordable ways build awareness and spent money cost-effectively. For the latter, it was all about being out and about. Going to events, posting comments on blogs – anything that you get your name and your brand noticed, hopefully with a bit of a story behind it. A big thing is getting the rest of your employees to do the same.

Once you start to spend money on awareness advertising initiatives, it doesn’t matter how effective that initiative is; it will build awareness for one group guaranteed: salespeople. Particularly salespeople for other advertising companies. Most marketers probably consider this annoying because they are now inundated with cold calls and emails about a ton of marketing initiatives on which they don’t have money to spend. But this phenomenon presents a huge opportunity for the startup marketer. That opportunity is counterselling. It functions primarily the same way you would want to convert your target market: awareness leads to consideration which leads to trial.

So now you have a targeted group of potential customers emailing and calling you to find out more about your business. Who cares if they ulterior motives for that behavior? They’re still potential customers. So what I did is I responded to them. I thanked them for their emails. I set up phone calls. What did I do on those phone calls? First, I pretended I had money. Second, I told them the truth in that I had very little time. Lastly, and most importantly, I countersold.

Now, I want preface this by saying I am not a natural salesman and that I’m not saying all startup marketers need to become salespeople. The beauty of this group of potential customers is that their job is to listen to potential clients. And once you are on the phone with them, you are a potential client.

So what is counterselling and how does it work? Well, if a salesman is any good at their job, on that phone call their main job is to ask a lot of qualifying questions to make sure you can be a successful client for their company. These will vary by company, but mainly their intention is to make sure they aren’t selling forks to an ice cream shop kind of stuff. What these questions do though is give you a chance to tell the story of your company: how it was founded, the value proposition, a funny anecdote about how some people are using the service, and ideally, something that makes the company look bigger than it is.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Sounds a lot like one-to-one marketing. I need a million users not to get fired. I don’t have time for this. Well, firstly, one customer is better than zero customers, and two, it’s isn’t one-to-one, and I’ll tell you why. The goal of your answers to their qualifying questions should be two-fold. First, you want to get the salesperson excited about trying your product him or herself. This is much easier to do than for normal users as it helps them qualify your product as a good potential sale or not, and they think it will impress you that they’ve used the product, making it more likely they can close.

Second, you want to sell the salesperson on the fact that you’re a serious potential deal. This is not hard as salespeople are notoriously optimistic, and because you pretended you have money, their biggest obstacle. What this second objective accomplishes makes sure of is that this salesperson at least tells one other person at their company about you i.e. their boss, and more likely, their entire sales team. The reason for the latter is because he wants to protect himself from one of his team members also calling on you and stealing his sale. So what you have after one call is basically a brand evangelist at that company.

Now, I don’t want to create the illusion that this always works, but it’s been pretty effective for me at enticing trial of the service. And if your product is good, trial can very easily lead to a repeat customer or a few repeat customers at that company. Also, I want to make sure you know that this is a good thing for the salesperson. They get to tell their story more often as well, and have a shot at convincing you they normally wouldn’t have gotten.

I also want to mention that the sales process does not stop there for this company. They are going to come back with two things (lots of dualities in this post I’m noticing):

1) a more serious meeting/proposal

2) some feedback on using your product.

It’s important to take both very seriously. If you dismiss the first, you will not have a repeat customer out of spite. If you dismiss the second, you’re just a bad marketer. I’ll assume you’re taking care of the latter, so let’s discuss the meeting/proposal in more detail below.

When a salesperson asks for a meeting or sends a proposal, it’s important to respond with something. First off, taking a meeting is not a bad idea if it’s genuinely a solution you may consider. You can learn about costs and implementation and add it to your marketing plan once you are ready for it and/or have the funds. But you may decide there is no value for you to taking the meeting. In this case, you have to handle things gracefully to keep them on your side. I generally like to blame things on the boss, saying that we re-prioritized some things and won’t be able to consider this for another six months. Something like that. Always thank them for their time and give compliments about their service.

All a salesperson wants is a fair shot at your business. So make sure they know they got one, and you can use counterselling to effectively build awareness, consideration, and trial within other companies.

My Building Internet Startups Class Final Presentation: Cartogram

For Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky’s Building Internet Startups class at the University of Chicago, each student was asked to build a 5-10 page presentation for a new startup idea. Out of the 100 students in the class, seven were selected to be presented in front of the class. Mine was one of the seven chosen. See it below.

Cartogram: Internet Startup Final Presentation

View more presentations from caseywinters

Don’t Be Social Until You’ve Grown Up A Little

I’ve been meeting with a lot of people lately that are launching their own web businesses and hearing about even more. Naturally, they get very excited about what the site’s going to look like, all of the features it’s going to have, etc. There’s just one problem. Their site isn’t live yet. And it doesn’t have a launch date. I’d be much more impressed by them if I could see something, anything really. Reid Hoffmann, the founder of LinkedIn and a serial entrepreneur/investor once said, “If you aren’t embarrassed by what you launched with, you waited too long to launch.”

I’m going to take this thought a step further.  One of the most common features people will talk about in these cases are all the ways you’ll be able to interact on the site. They’ll talk about how they’re going to have a blog, a comment system, a forum, a social network, rss feeds – a myriad of ways their audience will be able to interact with the site. But, there is just one problem: they don’t have an audience yet. So when people do start to show up, they’re going to see an empty forum, only one blog post because they don’t have a blogger yet, no comments on the launch blog. Basically people see a site that’s dead or unpopular instead of a site they’re dying to interact with.

Social aspects to a company should be added over time as a company builds an audience that requires those interactions. It is best to wait once you have an audience or a community that wants to interact with you more before you suggest ways to do so to an audience that doesn’t even exist yet. Then, when you add these aspects, you can be seen as responding to the needs of the community and be confident that they are things that will actually be used. You may find that customers want to interact with you the company, but not others that use the service. You may find the opposite. Those outcomes require completely different services. It may be a forum you need, or it may something totally different.

These are things that are important to learn over time instead of predicting at the start of a company. You’ll end up with a company that grows with its audience, is responsive, and understands their needs. This is a relevant for a website as it is for a brick-and-mortar business. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment, but it does mean you should understand your audience before you determine how they’ll interact socially with you and with fellow customers.