On the Floor

These days, everyone has an idea for a web application. The stunning success (and stunning valuation) of simple services like Twitter has made a lot of people figure the social media website bandwagon is a pretty easy one to jump onto.

We're a company that develops web applications, so we get approached with ideas for sites pretty frequently. Personally, I love talking about business and website ideas, whether the ideas are properly fleshed out or not, and whether money exists to build them or not. Some great projects I've worked on have been born that way. However, sometimes I come across certain proposals which demonstrate an extraordinary level of unfounded optimism.

These proposals confidently assert they will be as popular as Facebook, or Twitter, or some other super-popular site, or they claim some special characteristic or combination of features that will make them sure to catch on with a huge swathe of social media users. They are sure winners, great ideas that just need a technical team for execution.

It's just not that easy.

In The Stuff of Thought, author Steven Pinker discusses the origin of new words (neologisms). He talks about the difficult time word-inventors have when they try to popularize their inventions:

Even when a coiner pulls out all the stops to disseminate a new word to fill the lexical gap, an ungrateful populace will usually ignore him. In the year 2000, the conceptual artist Miltos Manetos noticed that the English language lacks a word for the high-tech aesthetic in product design, as in The new iPod Nano is really X, and a word for the genre of technologically driven artistic media such as video art, computer graphics, and digital animation, as in Our gallery showcases new artists working in X. Manetos suggested that a single word, used as an adjective and as a noun, could fill both gaps. In the spirit of the movement he was naming, he hired Lexicon Branding (the company that dreamed up Pentium, Celeron, Zima, Vibrance, Optima, and Alero) to generate candidates with their computer algorithm and staff of linguists. From the list they provided him, Manetos chose neen, which means "now" in old Greek. He rolled out the word at a packed event in a major New York art gallery, complete with journalists, critics, and a panel of commentators, including me.

Pinker predicted the word would fail, and it did. This was an easy prediction to make, he writes, "because most conspicuous coinages fail no matter what."

The same goes for many new websites. The combination of factors that lead to a super successful website are not easily duplicated. The luck component is not capable of duplication at all.

Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world, but it was not even close to the first social networking site invented: other large sites like Friendster and Myspace launched before it, and those are just the big ones. No doubt there were countless other sites that were based on the same or similar ideas that launched before Facebook did but failed to catch on (a colleague here at factor[e] built something similar for his high school years ago).

Many of the ideas behind these failed sites were just as good as the ideas behind the ones that succeeded. The difference in outcomes can be boiled down to execution and luck.

What does this mean for your web application idea? I think it means three things:

1) Refine Your Model

The book The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger Martin is about the ability of great executives to examine multiple models for business strategy, and rather than choosing one of them and accepting the trade-offs that are inherent in choosing an existing model, go on to creatively synthesize a new model that becomes wildly successful.

The book compellingly illustrates that any particular model we have of reality cannot be an entirely accurate representation of what is really going on, since it is just a model. Our brains are simply not capable of capturing reality precisely. Martin demonstrates the point: close your eyes, he says, and try to picture the room you are sitting in down to the last detail. When you open your eyes you will find that you have missed things.

It takes a serious commitment to come up with a truly winning model for a website. Most models that people have of what will make money and drive traffic online are not accurate.

Talk to a knowledgeable web professional about your idea and take their advice seriously. There's always a chance that your idea is very good but that they won't recognize it, in which case, talk to someone else. In many cases, however, they'll be able to provide valuable guidance, such as whether a similar web application exists already, or what you should do next. (Naturally, we think we'd be good people for you to talk to!)

2) Make Your Own Luck

To a certain extent, you can make your own luck by executing well, iterating rapidly, and seizing on opportunities. Unless you're already a top-notch web developer, good execution means partnering with a good team. It doesn't matter how good your idea is, if it doesn't look good and perform admirably, people will move on and they won't come back.

You're going to need a solid marketing plan, and you're going to have to stick with it. It's not going to be easy convincing the many people who surf just a few of the same sites every day to start adding your site to the list of sites they visit. A great site, based on a great model, will go a long way.

3) Be Realistic

The combination of factors that lead to the skyrocketing success of a site like Facebook or Twitter are as rare as winning the lottery. Buying lottery tickets is not an investment strategy. Relying on the assumption that your web application is destined for superstar success is a good way to wind up disappointed.

Instead, start by creating a plan to make you (and your employees) salaries that you can live on comfortably. After all, if your site is making enough money to pay your mortgage and your bills, it is already more profitable than Twitter!

By focusing on a realistic, manageable goal, you're less likely to face disappointment later. You'll be able to show a return on investment sooner and the case for further investment will become easier to make.

And if you develop the right product, who knows, you may find yourself at the helm of a skyrocketing success. There is certainly plenty of room for innovative companies online – perhaps more than ever before. In fact, this is one of the best times for startups in years. Good luck!