It’s not common practice for me to write reviews of other companies.  But, this is one of those special occasions.

As a software engineer and business person, it’s my prerogative and duty to make software/web sites/etc for other people.  The best way to make software for other people, however, is to make software for myself.  This is precisely what the phrase ‘eating your own dog food’ stands for.  If I can ‘eat it’, others will too.

I just ran across a product, which exemplifies this ideology: http://www.drop.io.  Think tinyurl, but with added perks.  Think mini-blog, but with added perks.  Think content management system, but with added perks.  I can go on.

So what is drop.io really? To quote, and there’s no point in paraphrasing:

Simple private exchange:

Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called “drops.”

The service has no email signup and no “accounts.” Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. Create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share or subscribe as you want. To make a drop just click the big red button that says ‘drop it’.

The amount of things you can do on a Drop make me very happy: http://www.drop.io/eatdogfood

To stay on topic though, take a look at the structure of the site itself.  The site in and of itself is a giant ‘drop’.  Granted, its contents are not editable by anyone but the admins.  But, it looks like the admins - the sites’ operators - wanted us to believe that they themselves use the site.  And they’ve succeeded gracefully.  My hats off!

Oh, and as an example, here’s the drop for this article:

I will be giving a presentation at the Weekend Apps [http://blog.weekendapps.com/about/] event on February 22nd.  This event, which will take place over the course of 3 days, will bring together some very bright minds to build a number of [what I hope to be] excellent Facebook Applications.  Weekend Apps takes cues from the very successful Stanford Facebook Course.  At Weekend Apps, a fairly large group of people will be broken up into smaller groups, where group members will contribute to the final product - a compelling, engaging, and viral Facebook Application.  I personally hope the groups will focus on the first two attributes, as virality can be built for any application.  It is possible to ‘teach’ the integration of viral features and viral flows into Facebook Apps (as demonstrated by the Stanford course), but *much* harder to teach the other two.

Weekend Apps has quite an impressive list of speakers [I don’t find myself too impressive - but I am on the list too]:

Presentations:

• Facebook Platform and Applications, by Dave Morin from Facebook.
• Incorporating your startup, and other legal details, by Chris Field from Orrick.
• Going from Zero to 1 Million Page Views in One Month, by Siqi Chen (App: Friends for Sale).
• How I reached 5M installs, Nicolas Kokkalis (App: Who’s your perfect match)
• Promoting and Monetizaing Facebook Apps, by KW Low (App: My Heros Abilities).
• Flex on Facebook: Flex Apps on FB Platform, by Alex Notov, founder Shockapps, and editor at Startupism.

I expect some really excellent pointers from Chris Field and a very exciting presentation from my friend and advisor Siqi Chen [he wrote an excellent series of articles on this blog some time ago about what works on Facebook - judging from the rampant success of Friends For Sale, he knows a thing or two].  Nicolas will likely focus on virality.  KW Low’s presentation should be pretty good as well.  I am always a fan of hearing opinions on monetization of apps - and have some of my own.  In my own presentation, I will focus on the benefits of using Flex, Flash, and AS3 to create highly compelling GUIs for Facebook apps, and web apps in general - in half the time, with no browser worries, with high code reusability, stunning visual effects, and other benefits not *easily* found in HTML/JS/CSS.  If you are a JAVA hacker[I never was - but so I heard], this will probably be right up your alley.

Anyway - enough self promotion… instead I would like to thank Adobe [sponsor at Weekend Apps], the brilliant team at Adobe Labs (with whom I had the pleasure of working to build Kuler), and all the people involved in Adobe products, who are responsible for making coding, design, and all facets of web application production phun.  Adobe was and will be on the cutting edge in the years to come.  Having worked with the guys and gals at Labs - I can tell you that first hand.

In closing, I’d like to plug the fact that tickets for Weekend Apps are free for a limited time [til 02/18]: http://weekendapps.eventbrite.com/?discount=FBAPPS

Who remembers Doom? Now, who remembers the reasons that Doom was so revolutionary from a technology perspective? One of the most important advances that John Carmack made with Doom was that it was the first game to incorporate Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), a concept that had been explored in the context of computer graphics as far back as 1969. (Yes, this info courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Carmack’s research resulted in the most efficient quasi-3D game engine the world had seen. Without it, Doom would not have been so fast, fun, or popular.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, one of the great benefits of working on a social network platform nowadays is that if you need to keep track of users, all that work has been done for you. No need to reinvent the wheel, right?

Unfortunately, that’s not the only challenge Alex and I have faced in our project. On the other hand, we have run into a lot of challenges that had solutions thoroughly documented somewhere online by brilliant (and generous) hobbyists. We have also run into challenges which could be at least partially solved by incorporating or learning from a piece of code available for free on somebody’s personal web site.

Don’t want to program user interface stuff from scratch in Flash? Use Flex. Don’t want to program your own Mac OS X-style dock in Flash? There’s already code available for nearly every version of Actionscript. Worried about drawing and organizing tiles in an isometric game? It’s already documented. Need to make a level editor for a tile-based game? Source code is available.

The moral of the story is that we always need to keep in mind that the vast majority of programming-related challenges have already been addressed in some form another. Unless you’re actually developing a new technology, the real work is in organizing your systems to work together efficiently and without bugs.

Maybe you’ll have to port code between languages and models, or maybe you’ll only be able to use somebody else’s code as reference while you rewrite something from scratch. And maybe you will end up hurting a little bit because of updates to the platform you’re working in that require you to re-write some of your imported code. Still, you’ll be happy you did the research instead of diving into a problem head-on expecting to be able to solve it on your own.

Regrettably, I write this from experience, as I feel we have wasted many hours of project time trying to solve problems on our own that have already been solved by others. Ultimately, we cannot remove trial and error from software development… but it feels so much better to learn from somebody else’s errors instead of your own!

A few days ago I attended the Lunch 2.0 event hosted at Oodle’s office in San Mateo. It was a departure from other Lunch 2.0 events I’ve attended for two important reasons: First, the food was really good Mediterranean cuisine, and second, there were no name tags.

Without name tags, the possible obvious conversation starters of “That’s a neat name for a company, what does it do,” “Oh you work for Google, that’s awesome,” “Oh you work for Microsoft, I’m sorry,” and “Interesting name, are you Jewish?” are all removed. What’s left is “Wow, that’s a lot of food on your plate.”

With that, I loaded up on pita and crackers covered in strange things that tasted pretty good and gave it my best shot.

My first conversation was with a woman who was new to the area and to the industry who asked the rather newbie-ish question of, “So, what is your company really doing to add value to the customer? How are you changing the world?”

What followed the question was a whole lot of explaining about how everybody in Silicon Valley is building widgets and copying each other and creating generally useless products.

“Well,” I said confidently, “we’re making an entertainment product.”

With that, I made it abundantly clear: We are not fooling ourselves.

It’s kind of a shame, because now that I think about it, the best coders, designers, and businesspeople I know are pursuing products that are purely about business. They’re products that are interesting that will generate revenue and build a company and that’s the end of it. Heck, that’s what I’m doing!

Meanwhile, I have talked to folks with real ambitions of changing the world, of doing something for the greater good, who are not particularly good with designing products or coding them or figuring out how they’re going to be viable to build a business.

Of course there are lots of exceptions to this; That’s not the point.

The point is that another outsider, venturing into industry mixers and trying to get a handle on the situation, would probably come to similar conclusions: There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who have set out to build nothing but frivolous widgets to waste peoples’ time in new and interesting ways. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but if that’s what it looks like from the outside then maybe Web 2.0 has an image problem.

What do you think? Leave a comment, or email me if you want to write an article for Startupism.

Aaron Nemoyten is Designer Supreme With Cheese for Shockapps.

Hey everybody.

Startupism has not been updated as often recently as any of us would like, and that’s mainly because we’re all fairly busy. The call has always been open for startup founders to send in articles or opinion pieces, though never a post about it on the front page.

UNTIL NOW!

So there you go. The pitch is that it’s a blog for articles and opinions for startup founders who have something to say but not enough time to maintain their own blogs. If you post once, there’s no obligation to post again.

We do prefer that articles be thoughtful and not about merely promoting your own company.

In other news, we’ve updated the design of Startupism using a theme that is easier on the eyes and a redesigned logo as well. If you’re a CSS ninja and you have any idea why the site seems to be broken in Safari, please leave a comment or send me an email.

Aaron Nemoyten is Designer Supreme With Cheese at Shockapps.

If you thought Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and John Carmack were onto something, think again. ‘Zillionaire’ Robert T. Bigelow is fulfilling his childhood dream of putting people into space by building the first privately-owned space station. And he already has orbiting prototypes full of live critters to prove the concept: http://www.wired.com/science/space/magazine/15-11/ff_spacehotel. This is a really amazing and inspiring article.

Just think… only a few decades ago Sputnik made its first orbit around the Earth, Laika the dog went up into space, Yuri Gagarin did the same, followed by the US manned visits to the Moon. Who’s to say that a few decades from now our grandchildren won’t be able to book a trip to a space hotel on expedia and a flight there on kayak. This is really awesome stuff.

I’ll admit it - I love reading Valleywag. It’s a great cynical counter to TechCrunch, as well as to countless tech beat writers who parrot press releases and are baffled when high-flying and well-funded companies fail. This is also the domain of Uncov, which is pretty funny as well but doesn’t post nearly as often.

One of my favorite threads on Valleywag recently has been about the behind the scenes scandal at Pay By Touch, and I don’t know how much of it is accurate but damn is it exciting.

The gist of it? Their CEO is a crazy, egomaniac con-man who somehow raised three hundred million dollars for a company with no strategy which he was not at all qualified to run.This story sums it up pretty well.

Don’t believe that it’s doomed to fail? Try searching for businesses using Pay By Touch in the Bay Area.

A Biometrics company that stores my fingerprints, driver license number, and bank information…. and doesn’t work in one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the world? Sign me up!

So Pay By Touch attempted to basically replace credit cards, all at once. That’s a pretty unrealistic goal.

I started thinking about this in the shower today (this is where most of my good ideas come from) and thought, hey, what if I could run such a huge company? Access to multiple biometrics companies’ technology and minds and a crapload of funding? Sounds like a good time to me.

What’s the market opportunity though? Who could benefit most from biometrics? It’s far more useful and sensible a technology to verify identity, rather than to make financial transactions. With enough resources and some mass production, there are two obvious areas to get into: Corporate clients with major security concerns, and airports.

Now remember, this is fantasy world, so bare with me.

First, Pay By Touch could go after DHS contracts to outfit airports with biometrics hardware which customers could use for check-in. Of course, there would be major privacy concerns, but DHS would probably love to be able to cross-check the fingerprints of everyone on every airplane flying in the U.S., and the current administration seems to love having Big Brother-style surveillance at its disposal anyway. In fact, right there, Pay By Touch could be profitable.

Then they’d actually have to get to work, getting airlines on board and convincing people to register. Getting people used to this idea would probably take ten years or so, but the first people to use it would be frequent flyers - who could be given priority at check-in and allowed to show up later than everyone else in exchange for being a part of the program. Users could also maintain a profile via Pay By Touch, which would work across multiple airlines and store whatever preferences the airlines are interested in hearing about. For airlines with built-in computers (hint hint, Virgin America), the profile could even be used for ad targeting when the computers aren’t in use, or to recommend premium content.

Convincing people to adopt all of this without feeling like criminals is always going to be incredibly difficult, which is why I mentioned a ten year horizon for getting average consumers used to it.

However, major corporations dealing with sensitive information - most of them - would love to be able to use biometrics as opposed to those stupid magnetic/RFID cards which can be easily lost, broken, or stolen… unlike fingers. I am aware that some corporations use biometrics already, but a huge company like Pay By Touch could have used scale to appeal as a cheaper and/or standardized option… as well as using any government contracts to offset that cost.

After all of this, of course, they’ll have to change their name to something a little less molest-y.

But instead, they tried to take on the credit card industry and implement a strategy that only works if it is ubiquitous, which is nearly impossible to achieve.

That was a fun little exercise. If you could run a huge company, what would you do?

Today at the SNAP Summit, Lee Lorenzen said something that was both scary and encouraging, and it summed up the current social network platform craze very well. I can’t quote directly, but the gist of it was this: If this is a new era in what could potentially become a new bubble, we’re only at the equivalent stage of just before Netscape had their IPO in 1995.What does that mean? Let the good times roll for developers, programmers, VC’s, business development gurus, accountants, consultants, etc.?I certainly hope not.

At this point, the entire community seems to display and air of confident restraint, of overstating the value of what it’s doing but being careful not to do so by too much.

The mixed messages of the panelists at the SNAP Summit confirmed this, and depending on who you listened to, this is what you may have come away with:

• You can make a lot of money with ads, but not enough to quit your day job.

• You can pay your own salary by putting out an app and running ads, but you can’t build a business.

• Ad networks are working to raise CPM’s so that everyone can make more money.

• Advertising is not the way to go; Instead you should use micropayments.

• Advertising is the way to go, but you need to get a sponsor and be more creative.

• Advertising is not the way to go; Instead you should become an AceBucks affiliate.

• Only simple applications can succeed.

• Only interesting, useful, and complex applications can succeed.

The only non-mixed messages were in the subtext: This is a good thing, and we’re all going to do very, very well. Just follow our advice, and YOU CAN build the next great Facebook application, make a crap-ton of money, and we’ll all be happy.Honestly, there was some very good advice.

The most useful panel was the first, in which those with the most experience fine-tuning Facebook applications gave the rundown on how to optimize for engagement and virality.  (note: Not writing much about that here because my notes for it could make an entire separate article.)

On the less useful end, there was a “state of the platform” speech from FB Platform Lead Ami Vora, which was mostly a rehash of Facebook’s PR material. I will summarize:

“Why is Facebook so awesome? Because we came up with the idea of the Social Graph. And we map it. Nobody else does this. Booya.”

“Sixty billion page views per month. Fifty per user per day. Booya.”

“I’m going to talk about growth. See this graph? It looks like a hockey stick. Booya.”

“I’m going to talk about Facebook’s own applications. Photos is huge. Events is huge. Booya times five.”

“A fifth of Canada is using Facebook. Booya times twenty.”

“We don’t know what percentage of users tag photos…” (what? seriously?)

App-building 101, with Joel Seligstein, was pretty cool. He started with basics but went into specifics when it was question time. I wish Joel had been actually on a panel, or given more than half an hour to talk, because I felt like he was very honest, genuine, and interested in helping everyone to succeed. He also knew what he was talking about.

SIDE NOTE: I realize I came down pretty hard on Ami Vora. I also realize that Facebook is a relatively new company and they’re still figuring out who can speak well for them and what they should say, but why send out such a stiff presentation to a bunch of geeks who would rather get into technical details and have a real discussion? Seriously, next chance you get to do a talk like this, prepare something more interesting and send Joel out with a snazzy blazer. Leave the PR packet at home.

Moving on. There was a scaling talk. That’s not my department, though I found what sections I could understand to be fairly interesting. Long story short: Be ready to scale, because adding lots of users quickly can bring you down if you’re not prepared. Also, if you have a million users, you’re going to be spending about $1500 a month on hosting.

Next was the Future of Social Network Advertising, which had the most heated discussion. Unfortunately, it was moderated by Rafe Needleman, who took the podium apparently unaware of the topic of the panel and the names of his panelists… then stiffly read all of that information off of a piece of paper. For the next twenty minutes, he attempted to steer the conversation into exclusively a discussion about Microsoft, their ad platform, and their recent investment in Facebook.

Once he let go of the reins, the discussion got a lot more interesting, with Todd Sawicki from Lookery nearly shouting down the rest of the panel with his opinions on the future of pretty much everything - “All consumer applications will be free and ad supported!” Murtaza Hussein, whose current venture has a silly name and whose last venture is Xuqa.com, which has a silly name and a terrible logo, hunched quietly next to Mr Sawicki, apparently summoning all of his strength to interrupt Todd to tell him he disagreed.

It was at this point that Lee Lorenzen had some very interesting things to say (see beginning of this post), and the discussion settled into relative civility. Dave McClure, “Master of 500 Hats” (who should also have the title “Heckler of Panels”) managed to be the first and only person at the entire event to say “fuck” into a microphone.

It’s worth mentioning that while the advertising discussion was interesting and informative, everyone but Lee Lorenzen seemed to have self-promotional tourette’s; Lookery! AceBucks! CPM’s! Lookery! AceBucks!

Then there was a blogger roundtable, which uber-blogger Robert Scoble attempted to turn into a one-on-one between himself and Dan Farber from ZDNet. Over the course of the discussion, Scoble also made many mentions of having dinner with people from Google, as well as bragging about his 5,000 Facebook friends.

Nick O’Neill, from Allfacebook.com, was a lot funnier than I expected.

Lastly, we had a platforms strategies discussion, which featured developers of successful applications who blatantly contradicted a lot of what the other panels said about building apps - they represented Flixster, iLike, and more of the most complex and fully-featured applications on Facebook.

All told, it was a day well spent: There was a lot of good discussion, and I met some cool people at the event whom I otherwise may not have. At the same time, I still cannot help but think that the overwhelming idea that “We’ve only just begun…” is misleading, and that, like those fancy private summer camps for wannabe-rock-star high school students, nobody was willing to step up and say what has always been true, and what the Facebook platform is not going to change: “Many of you will try. Most of you will fail. Even if you follow our instructions and do everything ‘right,’ that does not ensure success.”

Then again, I’m still here, still trying, still working towards my platform-inspired dreams of building a big, awesome company that makes cool, useful, profitable products.

I may be cynical, but come on, there’s money on the table. What am I gonna do, leave it there for somebody else?

Aaron Nemoyten may or may not take credit for writing this article in a few weeks. Just wait and see.

Two weeks ago, me, my two partners in crime Aaron Nemoyten and Jessica Mah launched our first official Facebook application: Serial Killer. Suffice it to say that this application is the answer and ultimate de-facto shove in the face to all the other poke apps on Facebook. Before you get all offended by its rather innocuous content, please read the TOS.

Now onto the interesting stuff — Siqi Chen recently wrote a brilliant series of articles about Facebook virality, what works, and what doesn’t on the Facebook platform. In it he made it clear that certain apps, like the one we built, are currently successful by virtue of their inherent viral features. This is certainly true of Serial Killer. Currently the app is growing linearly, at the rate of ~800 users (considering a linear growth rate, this is damn good). Part of the reason the growth is linear is by design — we want to be ready for the hockey stick — and are currently happy with a straight and predictable line. But, even at ~800 daily new users, this presents some interesting design and scaling challenges. I had to optimize things three times already. Although I won’t get into the details of this now, suffice it to say it took quite a bit of work, patience and adapting to the 50k daily page views we are serving after 2 weeks in operation.

But what if I were to tell you that today we ‘accidentally’ doubled our page views from 50k to shy of 100k (the last few didn’t quite make it in before the clock struck midnight). Here’s why all this happened today… When Aaron and I got home at around 5pm today from a calm shopping trip, I found myself staring in awe at my screen. I was watching the 1-minute load average in ‘top’ go from .3 to 1, to 2, to 3, to 4, to 6, to 8, and eventually to 23 at its peak, all in a matter of about 2 minutes. Sadly I knew what was happening. We were being hit with a DOS (Denial of Service) attack. It turned out to be a DDOS. Three or four facebook users (who are now known as the ‘asshat brigade’), all from fa-away-parts like Taiwan, Singapore, and China, hit us with a bot-generated DDOS. I scrambled while analyzing the tail of our web server log and looking at top. Bottom line, I resolved the hole we had opened in our code in about 15 minutes, and we were up and running again (under a slight lockdown). The offenders were banned from our app.

The lesson to learn from all this: even if your Facebook application is optimized and running smoothly, and you are ready for 800 new users at 50k page views per day, you never know what’s around the door. Set up those alerts on your server, and make sure to be ready to dig up your logs. When your back is sweating and you’re frantically trying to lock access while minimizing the damage to your existing data, you know what it’s like to be coding for the facebook platform =).

Alex is currently digesting a good steak, which he cooked in celebration of a successful elimination of a DDOS Attack to his Facebook Application.

Now that we actually have something to show off which demonstrates that we kind of know what we’re doing, Alex and I have decided to get back into the habit of attending meetups.

Meetups are strange beasts. A bunch of people, bound by a broad common interest, lack of other social outlets and/or real industry connections, gather to awkwardly talk about their ideas, their plans for the future, and to try to figure out who is a potential employee, coworker, manager, cofounder, contractor, and/or insane person to be avoided at all costs.

Meetups are also a good place for newbies to go to learn the ropes of the industry they’re trying to get into. I don’t consider myself an expert by any means, but after months of constant reading and research, I’m not doing too poorly.

One of the types of people you may run into at a meetup is what I will call Newbie Idea Guy. Newbie Idea Guy is somewhat aware of the industry, but doesn’t know a lot about it. He comes up with a bunch of ideas that either already exist, or that are slight variations on something that already exists. Confronted by evidence that his (or her, I guess, though I’ve honestly never run into any women like this) idea is not unique, he will defend its uniqueness with some kind of circular argument that “yes, but I’d make it better/different” without any kind of clarification as to how.

As a bonus, you may find that Newbie Idea Guy thinks his idea of copying a web site “but better” is so valuable that he won’t even tell you what’s going to be better about it without talking about NDA’s.

Thus I come to what I will call, for the sake of this post, Conceptual Algebra.

In the case of a meetup I recently attended, there was a Newbie Idea Guy who wanted to build a travel site. Nevermind that he has no technical or design experience - as a business-degree-holding-recent-Bay Area-transplant, he wants to get into A MARKET. On THE INTERNET. It will work because “we’ll do it better,” and of course the “doing it better” task would actually go to whichever lucky audience member is allowed to work with Newbie Idea Guy on his AMAZING IDEA.

Equation 1:

Market != Idea.

Also: Market != Business Strategy.

For my next equation, we will examine a more intricate situation. A person with technical knowledge and boundless enthusiasm has an idea for something that is very useful in theory, but requires a lot of user participation. In fact, it only works with a lot of user participation involving people looking at, and interacting with, content their friends have created.

That’s tough.

The problem with strategies like this is that they do not work. (That’s a pretty important problem!)

Most of them have been focused on music: I can create playlists on Amazon.com or other music services, which my friends can marvel at. In theory.

In practice, my friends know what music I listen to already. They do not need to look at a list on a third party web site on the internet. They know I listen to a bunch of weird music and a bunch of pop music, and they either think that’s cool or they don’t. I’m going to tell them what I think they would like in regular communication, NOT redirect them to my online play list.

Okay, so how can something like this potentially work?

Well, it would have to be a much more specific use. A narrow target market who is already interested in sharing, in interacting. A market of people who value communication amongst peers in a formal, controlled context, especially input in regards to whatever their interests are.

But then again, most of that would have to be *a feature* on a much larger community web site (see my previous post on this blog about that!). For instance, a cooking community site could easily make use of top ten lists for recipes - people who cook always want new ones and love sharing their knowledge.

At any rate, I asked this person with this idea what his target demographic was.

“Oh, you know, 18-35 year olds, independent, well-employed…”

No, no, and no. This is the market that EVERYONE wants a piece of, but it’s damn hard to get anything out of us. We’re immune to advertising. Things that work take time, and we’re very picky about adapting technologies and habits. I could go on.

Equation 2:

Idea - Market = 0

A decent idea targeted at the wrong market will go nowhere. Guaranteed.

For my third, and saddest, example, I’m going to have to get even more hypothetical.

Say you’ve got great technical skills. You’ve built something VERY impressive from a technical perspective, but those who are immediately impressed by it are also the least likely to use it. In other words, it’s a complex thing that makes it easy to do something that geeks need more control over than it gives them.

So the problem is that you need to target a market that would take the technology for granted but still find the product really useful. The truth is, it’s VERY useful to them, and more powerful than anything else they have access to.

So, I ask Hypothetical Person Number Three, how are you going after this demographic?

The short answer: We’re not.

Are you licensing the technology to a company who already has access to this demographic?

The short answer: No.

Equation 3:

Superior Technology - Targeted Marketing = 0

As a side note, I once worked for a company that had a major target demographic vs. business strategy issue. They had a product which used a clearly superior technology compared to the entire rest of the field, but refused to lower the price enough to make it a viable consumer option. The markup on the product, compared to manufacturing costs, was about 500%. No technology licensing, no price reduction, no retail sales, and consistently low volume. I can attribute 100% of this strategy to stubborn management.

For more on what I’m talking about, a great article is Marc Adreessen’s article about a term he calls product-market fit. I love this article. In fact, I love his blog. Best consistent, free advice to web business newbs I can find.

The most difficult aspect in all of this is that geeks have very different criteria for what is a good product idea than the rest of the world, and a very different idea of what is a good strategy to spread that product enough to achieve name recognition and/or profitability. In a discussion amongst geeks, the most technically impressive products often get the most attention (see TechCrunch), and there’s somewhat of an assumption that a good product or a superior technology can overcome all obstacles. Unfortunately, that’s not true a lot of the time. I’m not going to suggest that it is a matter of luck, but sometimes when a certain band becomes popular or a derivative Hollywood romantic comedy, as much as I know about both industries, the most I can do is throw up my hands and let out an exasperated sigh.

Whew, this has been a long post. Please leave comments - I would love to hear from people who know a lot more about this than I do.

Aaron Nemoyten lives in Berkeley and is currently working on a few entertainment products for the Facebook platform. He would like to get into an argument with Marc Adreessen and use “I have achieved product-market fit - with your mom!” as a comeback.