When I graduated college in 2006 my then girlfriend (now wife) asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up. After much thought, I came back to her with my answer: I wanted to create a start-up. I liked the idea of going into work, working exactly on what I wanted to work on. All day, every day. If I had an idea for a website or product, that is what I am implementing that day. After four years of trying out various things, I launched 1stvote.com.
I started 1stvote.com because I wanted the online shopping experience to be more social. I always found good deals online but it was difficult to share it with my friends and find out what my friends were interested in. I thought the internet social media scene applied to products would be an innovative concept and one that would stand alone from online retailers own rating systems.
Now I'll talk about four pieces of advice that helped me with the start-up.
Kevin Rose gave a talk where he said something like give users power to contribute to the site and make the experience fun. I tried to implement that in 1stvote with submissions, voting, comments, reviews, and the top users every month. When users can see the product that they submitted make it to the front page it's a very fun and engaging experience because they have changed the site and they immediately see the results. The top users section is really fun because people get to be competitive while being able to see their positions update. I get to see people interact as they employ strategy and teamwork to get to the top while making the site more content rich at the same time.
In the same talk Kevin Rose said to develop a podcast. My friend Kenji Hasegawa and I started a podcast, Votecast, where we talk about the products submitted to 1stvote.com. Diggnation was our source of inspiration. We also engage the community by soliciting viewer feedback through product submissions and emails. It really is a lot of fun to sit on a couch, drink beers, and talk about products.
Guy Kawasaki has blogged about how to work with only a few engineers, keep it small, and having a small business mentality when first starting out. I took this advice to heart. There are only two people working on 1stvote.com. My friend George Barrett does the graphic design work and I do the programming. We don't even have any business people yet because it's such a small operation. Some see this as a positive though. The source escapes me right now, but I have read articles where some people go so far as devaluing the company for each business or econ major the company has. We do have plans of getting business people when the time comes, but, we realize, this is not that time.
Guy Kawasaki has also blogged about how getting your product out faster is more important then getting it perfect. I really took to this advice and worked on getting the first functional thing out the door as quickly as possible. I can always make updates later. Also, user feedback is really important. Things that I thought were big deals turned out not to be big deals at all and things I hadn't thought of that turned out to be really good features came from listening to the users. The top user section on 1stvote.com was based completely on user feedback and its one of the most fun features of the site.
If I had anything to add I would say don't solicit feedback on a website idea. If you have an idea in mind, make that idea happen. Once you get it up and running then use the feedback to make your site better.
These paragraphs might not be verbatim of what was said, but these are the themes I got from them so I have attributed the sources. If you are Kevin Rose or Guy Kawasaki and feel I have misrepresented you, misquoted you (although I didn't really quote, I kinda paraphrased), didn't put your ideas in a positive light, hurt, maimed, or otherwise messed up your ideas and your image, my bad, please let me know and I will edit, change, redact, or delete this blog post.
No entrepreneurs were harmed in the making of this blog post.
0 Comments
