VC funding is not a liquidation event. When you’re playing in an emerging market, the most you can do is speculate. VC rounds are hard numbers, but they’re not market intelligence, unless you’re price shopping for interest rate. Borrowing money is not the definition of success, it’s a sign that you’re not making a profit.
Search is not broken. Search works great for most people most of the time. There’s a few places where search can improve, and you can round up the corners. But if you understand that it’s not broken, just has some untapped niche markets, you’ll be able to cost it better.
There’s no bottomless pit of attention. We have not found a cure for sleep, and people still don’t have more spare time to divert more attention to more services. Attention is hard to find. And what TechCrunch gives this week, TechCrunch takes away next week when someone outdoes you with better gradients.
All problems are interesting to solve. Some problems are also profitable to solve. It depends on how cheaply you can do it in the face of mounting competition. Yes, you can make a boatload of money dominating in the software industry, but even Microsoft’s ticket for success was bought for cheap. The Web is not different.
Objects in the mirror look closer than they are. Craigslist, Evite and Yahoo Groups didn’t just happen, they took years to build up the audience. And it will take you years to build up your audience, and a smaller one if you’re trying to win users away.
People are intelligently lazy. In VC pitches people have a tagging problem they can intelligently solve by being lazy and using your service. In real life, people have real problems and they’re intelligently lazy enough to ignore your service.
All the good ideas are taken. Launching on TechCrunch a week ahead of your competitors is not being first to market. It’s being late to market by five years.
And what about the fallacy of ads? I don’t believe in that. Ads are a source of revenue and you can make profit. Provided that limited attention spread over years is enough to make your non-interesting solution profitable after you pay back the debt. It’s the other variables of the equation you need to pay attention to.
And last but not least, if you’re doing anything in the architecture of participation economy by leveraging user generated content to maximize the wisdom of crowd, maybe you should listen to the wisdom of crowd first. Read some blogs even if you don’t like what people have to say.
Wangtam
Gary Bourgeault (thealphamarketer.com)
Assaf
Chris Saad