This is part one of a series of posts, I have no idea how many posts it will be, but I hope you will find the information useful and valuable.
A few days ago I wrote part one of “what I learned from running a startup,” this is the continuation.
One of the first things I want to address is the distance between you and your customers. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, meaning you should ideally have two touch points one for you and one for your customers. You offer a product/service and if your customers says they want to use it, then give it to ’em. The problem with our model was that creating networks and communities in condo buildings didn’t depend on the residents themselves but instead on the HOA and the management company of a building. So for example, if I went to a 1,000 unit condo building and 90% of the residents wanted to sign up right away but the HOA said no, then that’s it, no community and no network. Typically HOAs say no because of fear, nobody wants to take responsibility for a community or for a network because there can be positive and negative feedback, positive is great, but nobody wants to hear the negative. This of course is a challenge with social media across vritually any industry today, opening up the communication floodgates means more work for everyone involved. We’re talking about more messages, requests, emails, conversations, contacts, etc.
So here we were, in a situation where many residents were excited about and eager to join a condo network, but couldn’t. When you are creating a product/service for users it’s never a good idea to limit them or turn them away, something we were forced to do many times. As a result, we were stuck in a situation where we had a product that people wanted to use but couldn’t access, obviously not a good thing. The product itself was scalable and fairly easy to implement, but the sales process was not. Convincing every HOA and Management company to take responsibility over a community is a daunting task and not something that can be replicated and continuously used. Most important lesson from this was if you make something for a user then let the user use it, otherwise there’s no point.
Another issue I want to address is size. Social media is able to succeed and thrive because of size. If you take a look at virtually any successful social network you will see that it allows access to everyone. Social networks need a lot of people to make them successful, heck so does the internet. Imagine wikipedia with only 10 articles and 10 editors, nobody would use it. What we were trying to do was to create private and secure networks for condo buildings, so if a condo building had 100 residents, then that’s the social network 100 people MAX, not a good idea. Eventually I wanted to scale this out to connect various condo buildings together, but we never got that far. When you are trying to get 100 people to use something you need at least a 60-70% initial adoption rate with around 50% of those people actively contributing to the platform. If a user sees that nobody else is using the network, then they won’t either. Lesson from this was that social media is successful because of scale and the ability to connect, putting a cap at the number of residents, is a horrible idea, there is only so much information and discoverability that 100 people will have, short shelf life.
What you should take out of this post
- shortest distance between you and your customers should be a straight line
- if your users want something, don’t say no, if you make something for a user, then let the user use it
- make sure your product/service AND process is scalable and replicable
- understand what makes your industry (and your product succeed) in our case the industry was social media which absolutely needed size to succeed
- make sure you understand user obstacles and reservations, in our case it was the HOA and their unwillingness to take responsibility
What would you have done differently? More information on the way!
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