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December, 2007 Monthly archive
By: Fred Oliveira
26-12-2007
Business, Web 2.0, Web-Applications

Startup names still suck

It’s now been a while since Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0. Thousands of applications and services emerged since – however chances are you can only remember and name about 10. Truth is branding has been ignored by many of the entrepreneurs looking to launch their ideas – and many are paying for the mistake with slow adoption or failure.

Not everything can be generic, and a brand is one of the most important things to nail down when launching a product or service. If you’re still thinking of removing vowels from words to make up a 2.0-ey name, stop because you’re clearly doing it wrong. Here’s an example of how naming is a zoo these days. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from a post by Om Malik:

Earlier this year we wrote about Gaboogie, a web-based conference call service started by Erik Lagerway. The service didn’t quite work out, and the company reconfigured its business focus to offering instant group calls from mobiles, and is now called Lypp.

Another web-based conferencing service, Foonz might be going down that route. Randy Corke, CEO of Foonz’s parent company, RPM Communications was in town last week to bring me up to speed on their new offering, Utterz, which is sort of like blogging-via-voice-calls from your cellphone.

Gaboogie is now called Lypp, and Foonz is launching Utterz. Are these people having a laugh? If I asked you to name the company with the golden arches, you’d probably say McDonalds; If I talked about the drink with the great bottle and the red brand, you’d likely say Coca-Cola; If I asked you about a web-based conferencing system, you would probably never remember Gaboogie, Lypp, Foonz or Utterz.

In contrast, I haven’t forgotten Joost’s pre-launch name “The Venice Project” (witty and smart) or “Jackson Fish Market” (weird and unexpected), a startup doing virtual gifts. Some will argue that once you hit critical mass how good a name is isn’t important, but it’s easy to make the argument that the name may have a huge impact on the growth itself – so please, do think about leaving those vowels in and give naming your new company more than 5 minutes of your time.

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By: Fred Oliveira
17-12-2007
Design, Development, Web 2.0, Web-Applications

Evaluating product ideas, defining success

Evan Williams has a very good post on evaluating product ideas based on his previous experience (launching Blogger, Odeo – pretty much forgotten in that article – and Twitter). I’ve been thinking about a couple of products as well (have been for a while, actually), so the whole article sort of fell into place with my own criteria. Here are Ev’s:

  • Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
  • Obviousness: Is it clear why people should use it?
  • Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
  • Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
  • Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
  • Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
  • Personally compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

To these I would add two other characteristics that I believe have a great impact on a product’s success: cleverness and trustworthiness. You know when a product is clever because you get the feeling of empowerment and delight. And trustworthiness (although perhaps difficult to assess initially) defines how people look at your product or service – if users can trust it, it is more likely that they’ll become engaged and use it often. People are often skeptical about things that dip into their personal affairs (think Facebook’s Beacon and why it sucks), but will feel at ease to engage and discover new things about a product if they trust it.

Ultimately, it isn’t easy to determine the likeliness of a product being successful by putting it to the test against a series of attributes – but it may help. I’m still a big fan of entrepreneurs following their gut and seeing where it takes them, but depending on the person, that might not be a good plan to stick to.

I definitely recommend you give Ev’s article a read if you’re an entrepreneur – you’re still here so chances are you’ll be interested. Unfortunately Evan still doesn’t allow comments on his blog, because I would imagine the discussion on such an article would be interesting.

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By: Fred Oliveira
12-12-2007
Business, Personal, Work

Edgeio up for sale, thoughts

Edgeio has been up on Techcrunch twice in 2 weeks because it’s closing down and assets are being sold. Being one of the startups I have personally been involved with in the past (and the main reason why I lived in Silicon Valley for a while), I can’t help but feel sad about its demise. Mainly because the idea behind Edgeio was/is quite powerful.

The idea of aggregating content from the edge of the publishing network (blogs) into one place that parses what’s being said and makes sense of it (in this case, extracting items for sale) is quite powerful. If well executed, one can make the case that it would have an impact on websites like Ebay, where people have to sign-up to sell something.

Despite the idea being good, the company failed. The discussion at Techcrunch talks about fast money burning, too many expenses (which Mike hinted at in his deadpool post) and not being the right time for that particular idea. All of these may be right, although I’m not going to comment on the economics because when I left Edgeio, it was still just about to getting funded and had been bootstrapped until then.

Bubble or not (I’ve shared my opinion about that countless times and am honestly tired of the discussion), failure is necessary sometimes – even if only for the ecosystem to catch a breath. Shame failure struck people I care about.

Writing this post made me remember waking up at 8am PST over at Mike‘s place to our almost daily product brainstorm meetings. I do miss those days – the people working on Edgeio then (I didn’t meet many of the new guys) were brilliant.

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By: Fred Oliveira
04-12-2007
Design, Development, User Experience, Web 2.0, Web-Applications

Colored labels: small change, major difference

Gmail colored labels What a difference a small change makes. Gmail launched what has probably been my #1 wanted feature since I’ve started using it: colored labels. Labels were useful already if you wanted to archive content meaningfully, but without a visual cue their impact on the inbox wasn’t really significant.

Colored labels however, make a huge difference. If you’re smart about the way you use labels, you can create a system for your email to prioritize conversations, organize a task list, or go all out and build a proper GTD system out of it – all with the visual cues of colored labels, because they allow you to at a glance understand what email belongs where without reading the subject or even the label text.

What to take away from this

Minor differences like these visual cues are some of the things that define application experiences, and frequently (and unfortunately) are forgotten by developers and people building products. Products that are meant to help people manage assets in their daily life in particular deserve this special caring eye on them.

People building web applications need to ask themselves “How can I provide meaningful cues to help my users?”. These things (like the need for cues) are not found by chance – people do express the need for cues and helping paths all the time, we just need to care enough to listen and make changes.

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About Webreakstuff

Webreakstuff is a product think tank. We've worked with companies like Bell Canada, Techcrunch, Totspot, Sequoia Capital, MTV and Sapo on their own products, and we've built a few of our own (most notably, Goplan - an online collaboration and project management tool). You should follow us on Twitter.

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Back in 2005 we found a need for a great online collaboration tool to manage our clients and projects. We built one for ourselves, and then decided to open it to a greater audience. We turned Goplan into a full-fledged product, and we've been maintaining the platform since.

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