Web Entrepreneurship One
The Architect, The Engineer and The Money Guy
This is the most basic starting team for new web and web related products. The first 2 guys, call them the developer and the coder (although each is likely some of both), can sometimes get it going alone in the basement and take it as far as possible on a shoestring. The further they can get before they need to pitch the money guy(s), the better they’re likely to do.
The product idea that most developers strive to come up with, usually an application, a bridge, or a newer better version of a hot destination trend, is typically related to their own interests and experiences.
It’s devoted gamers often developing the games they dream about, and music junkies who think up more-faster-better ways to get their fix.
This formula works, because whatever you love and know well is where you’re going to have the best ideas, most experience, highest motivation, and connection to the market.
The architect/developer is the constituent. Whatever you’re into, pick your genre(s) and create the product or service that you’d love to see and that no one else has yet.
The next most common entrepreneurial process I’m seeing is choosing a mass market product or service, again one that you know a lot about and use regularly, and creating a better portal or venue for it. You’re a car geek? Build a car parts exchange site, an international rental network, a specialty auction house.
This is the kind of individual entrepreneurship that our modern economies have been built on.
The Superstars
What distinguishes the superstar architects, such as Page of Google or Wales and Sanger of Wikipedia? Their focus is on the web landscape is broad, encompassing huge constituencies. They have vision beyond the personal sphere.
The same broad focus applies to successful money men, such as Diller of IAC, who has followed a path from the box to the web via a pattern of entertainment related acquisitions, and is well into the interactivity of the medium, given holdings such as uDate.
The superstar architect and businessman landscape is also wide open for development.
There are hundreds of millions of constituents whose presence on the web is quite limited. Weekly banking, a bit of research and reading, maybe a brief visit to eBay or LLBean, and the occasional bookings through Tickemaster and Expedia, pretty much cover all they’ve found to suit so far. These are not the teens on MySpace and YouTube whose valuable eyeballs represent a small segment of the population, and they aren’t particularly tech savvy. They really believe that there isn’t much here yet. They have tremendous spending power.
What will be developed for them next?
I think that building something for everyone is very different from building something that is targeted to you and your personal peers and networks.
I also believe there are lots of places in the sun for both.
October 1st, 2006 at 6:39 am
Getting an online business to work is primarily going to be about viral marketing - you got to get the idea to market itself through the community. Look at the huge number of Web 2.0 startups out there. How many do you think will actually succeed?
October 1st, 2006 at 3:42 pm
I agree with you, interepid. Rather than writing a small book in one post, I decided to break this topic up, so ONE started with the founder(s) and the idea.
It’s great to have comments and conversation on execution.
Perhaps it is a gap in connection, between the entrepreneur and the constituency, that is the biggest reason most start ups will fail (given that the idea/concept is sound).
I think that how the finished product or service looks and feels when you finally, proudly, put it into the customers’ hands is the most essential connector. If you can make that one spark, then speeding the ignition of the viral spread is a process that can be learned, especially since it continues to evolve with the growth of this medium.
Vera