Guest Post By Yarin Hochman
In the last couple of weeks there were many tech conferences events here in Israel, after attending most of them, I must say that more then ever I’m convinced that early stage startups should focus most of their attention in the products themselves and not so much in their business model and revenue generation, even as the economic atmosphere pressures.
Ev Williams Twitter CEO & co-founder was asked last week at web 2.0 expo, what advice would he give today to someone trying to build their own startup? His answer:
The core thing would be just do something awesome. Try not to get caught up in the echo chamber.
That is probably the toughest thing when you are trying to break out and do something original.
I think that Yossi Vardi’s famous saying that revenues are distraction is still very much relevant even at this economic climate, I believe young companies should always aim for the best user experience possible by building products that people will fall in love in, and want to use.
In my opinion that is 10 times harder to build than some sophisticated business model, additionally, I believe once you actually get the eye balls, the loyal users who use your product on a daily basis it is getting much simpler to start thinking business and how monetize-generate revenue off these users.
Now I’m not a VC, or anything, but I’d like to share with you the way I evaluate startup’s products (including those I work on) :
-Beneath all the fancy technology, core ideas, and even vision What’s the benefit for the end user?
(what do they get out of it?)
-Would I want to use the service?
-Would my parents (i.e older people) use it, could understand it?
Now obviously there’s much more to evaluating a company’s product, but for me these are the high order of bytes, the benefit to the end user and the “WOW” factor of the product are the things that are often the difference between a business’ failure and a runaway success stories.
Until recently it was common for startups not to think about the business side of their projects, and their plan was basically aiming to make an exit, sell the company for millions of dollars, and that was fine for then but today unless you somehow reinvent the wheel which let’s be honest most of us probably will not, it just wont happen in the near future.
Now don’t get all pessimistic, good news is that the costs of both starting and running a web based startup has dropped dramatically over the past couple of years, and if history is any evident the best companies are built during down times, and those who will survive it will most likely make a killing in the long run and will kick ass.
Two weeks ago I attended a wonderful tech event called: Techonomy, it was an excellent event organized by well known Israeli blogger Orli Yakuel of GO2WEB20, the event was a real treat, well organized and the startups which presented had been carefully chosen, and did great.
Image credit: ilan peer
The presentations were really good and the panel of experts tried to push the discussion around their business model, and about their ability to become profitable.(It was called Techonomy) But I want to focus on something else here, with equal if not greater importance.
In the last couple of events here in Israel we started this new thing of placing a screen on stage next to the presenters with realtime tweets that simply carry the #Hashtag of the event, In Techonomy’s case (#Techonomy) more then 600 tweets were sent in over 4 hours, and it quickly even became a trending topic on Twitter.com
My point here is that we are witnessing a major shift here in terms of the end benefit to the users, and users satisfaction; after each appearance, the lights were up and the panelists gave their thoughts on the startup, but most of the audience didn’t really paid much attention. Why? Because they were all Twittering away giving their thoughts on the product, hashtagging everything neatly, and even replying directly to the founders on stage to check out the feedback.
I personally enjoyed the panelists’ thoughts and input, but I think what were seeing here is something quite extraordinary, where basically anyone can participate, share and receive info in realtime-live events.
Now for the startups presenting, I’m 100% sure that the exposure and the twitter feedback they received was much more valuable than the panelists thoughts, and for that matter even more valuable than most typical feedback companies receive, these guys couldn’t have gotten any other way.
Let’s play with the numbers, say an average tech savvy attendee has about 150 followers on twitter, and there were about 300 sits in the audience, that’s 45,000 twitter users, who will check the product and if they find it awesome and love it, pass it on and so forth. (and we never even mentioned Facebook here 
)
I think we’re getting to a stage when people are becoming much more demanding, expecting higher standards than ever, and the companies that will not have an awesome solution that will make us all go WOW, and play smart with social media just aren’t going to make it.
Now before I get many backlashes here, of course a founders should know their numbers well and have a revenue model down the road, I just think that focusing on the products themselves is much more important and valuable in building something long term, and more rewording even in this day and age.
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