05.23.07
Posted in Industry Take at 3:18 pm by Emil Sarnogoev
Recently I thought about what can make a successful community site. So far it seems that any successful social software explicitly or implicitly imitates offline behavior of its users. In short, people like to do what they always do without the need to learn something revolutionary new or adopting unrelated new action patterns.
When you muddle through Wal-Mart signs, you hope to catch a glimpse of what you need instead of getting down to the product placement system. It’s funny how much time you can spend on that. Finally you ask an assistant to tell you exactly where your cornflakes pack hides. The same approach you use when you navigate sites. No will to understand the 4 level menu hierarchy, no time to read everything through, you just shoot everywhere until you find whatever seems to resemble what you originally need.
Extreme cases of such behavior are not-so-savvy Internet users. Frankly saying your business hunts exactly for them. Smart sites know that and adjust accordingly. Of course, this applies to every aspect of user experience, including how your features work to help you interact with other people. Maybe later Internet is going to change human behavior dramatically, so far using offline-dominating trends gives great benefits.
Blogging example
Why is blogging a phenomenon as a widespread and successful communication/self-expression tool? Blogging is basically a good way to let people know that you’re still kicking. On the other hand, reading blogs is finding out how the person has been since the last time you interfered. Recent posts on various topics are the answer to your “what’s up?” question that you face your friend with after a couple of days.
People say a lot of things - their own thoughts, thoughts on others’ thoughts, their take on events, well-known things, plain had-breakfast-with-jeff-and-jenny talkings are also an important part of everyone’s life. Other people listen to it, express their own opinions, comment and argue. In fact, if you are listened by other people, it encourages you to talking further, refining your thoughts. If you are an authority on some questions, people listen to what you say and quote you later to other people. In fact, gaining some respect and authority makes you addicted to gain even more. Up to the point when you can make money out of thinking, talking, and writing. Now, recognize all this in blogging.
While forums do not really belong to anyone of the participants, blogs are `homes` for authors and they are taken appropriate care in terms of design and content.
Social networking sites
Imagine, you are in your teen age and got a cool new friend. What do you do? You talk the hell out about yourself. You introduce her to your best friends; you take her home to show what your bedroom is like; show all your photos, childhood and prom videos; play all your favorite CDs; get her know all your weird hobbies. And you want the same shower of information in return.
It’s good that MySpace offers something more than that, like viral marketing and promotion opportunities, its primary use is still showing off, self-expression and what’s-up communication. There are a lot of social networking sites nowadays, of different sizes, features and level of user-friendliness. I believe those of them adopting better offline life imitations will eventually win users. Thus MySpace stole Friendster traffic for just loading pages faster and implementing on-demand features.
So, how do modern community sites reflect our offline life? Your take?
And the corresponding question: How can the most obvious offline life people habits and patterns of behavior be reflected on the Web to create successful startups?
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04.30.07
Posted in Industry Take at 3:26 am by Emil Sarnogoev
After many years of writing and using software I seem to have determined my opinion about internet business based on software.
Free/Opensource products
Open source is a great ideology, it came to create good software written by communities of great hackers. Open source software clearly benefits when there’s a considerable amount of motivated contributors who communicate well and contribute on a constant basis. In a somewhat mature stage open source software doesn’t really belong to anyone because there are several successful branches adopted by users. Open source will choose the most viable branch of software among the concurrent ones because people will use it most of all and contributors will be motivated to develop the best one further. Open source works when contributors and users audiences overlap greatly. Contributors need to be users to be motivated to develop the software further.
That is how open source was supposed to work and how it works. Best examples are Linux/Unix branches, of course.
Unfortunately that is not the case in online dating, social networking and community software market. I see neither enthusiastic individuals, nor companies being able to provide real benefits of open source software but making users face the downsides of running business this way.
Companies need to earn money. There’s also an opinion that any successful free product run by a company is going to become commercial to stay relevant.
Some individuals or small groups offer free software but rarely can offer good support for it because it’s a much bigger fun to write software than to offer ticket or phone support. At best, you are thrown to a public forum where individuals like you search for help. This is the point of the biggest inconsistency of interests between you and the developers. Further, how do you see developers’ project dedication change in one year? Do you really imagine your business depend on factors like the developers’ interests moving to something else.
The problem is that opensource product development is under no control of the most consumers. Face it: there are different stages of a software product lifetime, and some are more fun than others. One likes developing new features more than debugging. There are endless examples of opensource software projects fading away after initial stage enthusiasm end.
When you run business you HAVE to have someone in charge of everything. With opensource software you can only rely on yourself in maintaining your production site. Or you end up paying to 3rd parties who are not the original authors of the software. Most 3rd party contractors will write the code their own way, so you are at risk of sacrificing the original architecture and flexibility - this often costs a fortune in the long run.
Commercial products
Basically, I nail down this section to the old but often disregarded truth: you get what you pay for. Paying a lot of money in itself is not a guarantee of anything, though, because there are a lot of examples of bad overpriced products and services. There’s a lot to check in commercial software before contracting with the vendor. You might want to check if administration is convenient and powerful enough; if customer support response time is reasonable; if EULA conditions fit your needs. Finally, you can find out if the live demo speaks to you at all.
Never do I say that with all other things being equal software developed for money is better than software written for the love of it - everything depends on developers doing it. It just requires financial remuneration to keep bright people occupied full-time to produce stable result. Since you want to run a business, you NEED stable, predictable result.
Why SkaDate?
SkaDate is the leading vendor of hosted solutions for dating sites due to a unique approach to maintaining a large number of managed sites. We have grown from a leased dedicated server to our own datacenter. Since the SkaDate SuccessPoint distribution start (Aug’06) we set up almost 500 sites and no, we do not experience significant growth problems, because of the software quality and trained support staff. We use our own technique of semi-automatic maintaining, upgrading and fixing sites which makes possible to offer a full-featured dating community site for just $55/month which can be set up within 30 minutes. These numbers speak for themselves.
Since we adopted software as a service business model, our customers must have strong reasons to pay further every month. That is not the old school sale-done-game-over software distribution principle, and the most important, this fact unites our and customers’ interests.
Who should use SkaDate?
1) Online community business entrepreneurs willing to concentrate on site promotion and to delegate all technical background issues to professionals. Our managed solution is a simple and working business offer for those who want to do business but don’t want to do mechanics (SkaDate managed solution).
2) Technically skilled webmasters willing to find a stable software package with flexible configuration and strong architecture for further development (SkaDate software solution).
One note should be made - we found out that there’s also a considerable amount of skilled webmasters among our managed clients. Paradox? Probably not. I think it has more to do with understanding of division of labor and one-stop-shop solution benefits.
Who should not use SkaDate?
I will probably not use SkaDate (as well as virtually no other pre-developed software) if:
1) Nothing on the market fits well my unique project needs;
2) I can build significant amount of my project code by myself;
3) I can devote a lot of time and force for that.
In this case, I actually want a completely custom built software, so I go buy or get free the simplest and least-featured package out there just to save time for writing primary inevitable stuff provided that the software has sensible architecture, can be scaled well into the future, and can be changed to a point beyond recognition, since this is what my
plan looks like. Or just write everything from scratch. Though this is always the temptation all startups face, it makes much less sense than most people think. You decide.
–
In the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which kind of a license software comes with. It’s all about management, projection, development, and – important - after-sale support. The further you run your business, the more individual support and development you need. Thus, the question of paid support and maintenance is becoming more critical. It’s just natural that for a piece of software that needs to be systematically developed and constantly taken care of, supported commercial product with serious customer service seems to be the only option for businesses.
Thank you,
Emil Sarnogoev,
Founder & CEO
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