Andrew Chen is a startup investor and growth expert who writes about user acquisition, product design, marketing and consumer startups.
HN commenters point to him as the person to read on user acquisition, and link his freemium spreadsheet model post.
If you're a technical founder, with some interest and understanding on how to create some buzz around your app and get in users - I'd say, you don't really need a business / non-technical founder early on. Though, at some stage when you start scaling up, you will need someone (could be technical or non-technical) who can help on the business side. Andrew Chen's recent post has some good points on this -
http://andrewchenblog.com/2011/02/05/stanford-cs-major-seeks-salesmarketing-monkey/
"What do geeks really need help with? It’s very simple- there’s a class of purely business-related stuff that adds value:
selling stuff and making money
getting partnerships and marketing/distribution of the product
funding the company
scalable marketing/monetization strategy (ad arb / viral / freemium / etc.)
team recruiting, particularly of other engineers and disciplines (not other MBAs please)
If you are an expert at any of the above and can show it, then there’s a lot more value. Very few business folks, particularly newly-minted MBAs (with the exception of Stanford folks) or industry-switchers can really deliver on these though, which is why they’re not bringing much to the table.
Then there’s a class of things that are much more product-oriented, and while it overlaps with the skillset of some engineers, if you have great skills in any of the following, they are clearly valuable too:
design, especially visual design
UI/frontend skills – HTML/CSS/JS – even if mediocre!
copywriting…
Great question.
It does seem that the tech-world lags behind in terms of the role of the designer, when compared with that of Industrial Design for example.
Take IDEO. An Industrial Design consultancy at heart who over the last 10 years have evolved into a consultancy that focus's more broadly on innovation, design thinking, strategy and designing businesses.
Whereas once upon a time an Industrial Designer's job would be to 'skin' a product and bridge the gap between marketing and engineering. The Industrial Designers role at leading design focused now companies now play a more prominent part in the development of business. Providing a divergent-thought design led process to tackle problems surrounding the product and service.
Web designers are yet to take take this step. And for the most part focus on the designing of pixels as opposed to the designing of businesses.
Andrew Chen breaks down IDEO's philosophy of human led design in which they argue that there's 3 perspectives when developing a service, which for me really sums up the true value a design-founder can hold. That of Viability, Feasibility and Desirability.
In which:
Viability = Business focus (marketing, finance)
Feasibility = Engineering focus (technologies, agile etc.)
Desirability = Design focus (customers, aesthetics, etc.)
IDEO design from a desirability focus which means that the user comes first, everything is done from their eyes with a keen focus on usability and aesthetics in result creating a…
Viral growth actually can be explained with a formula for the viral factor (aka viral coefficient or k-factor). You can see the basic formula for Send Hotness's viral factor here: http://www.slideshare.net/StanFan/send-hotness-stanford-facebook-class. When your viral factor is above 1.0, you will see exponential growth. In the case of Send Hotness, our viral factor was approximately 1.4, which allowed us to grow to 5 million users in 5 weeks. We spent much of our time in the Stanford Facebook class measuring and tuning the viral factor.
While it was easier back in the early days of 2007-08 to build viral apps on Facebook (hence the "gold rush" that is referred to in the article), it is still possible to do so today, albeit with quite a bit more effort. As you can see here, we have recently been growing virally at friend.ly, to the tune of 5 million users in the past couple of months: http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/5569318595-friend-ly
One other thing I should point out is that viral growth alone is not enough. Without engagement/retention, you will likely "jump the shark", as you can see Andrew Chen has discussed in the following blog post: http://andrewchenblog.com/2008/03/05/facebook-viral-marketing-when-and-why-do-apps-jump-the-shark/ This is one of the reasons why we have spent the past 18 months at friend.ly focusing on engagement and retention before trying to grow virally.
By way of full disclosure, I am Ed Baker, who Aaron refers to above. Aaron, good to…
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FWIW, I wrote that same feature for Wishpot (price alerts) including the infrastructure for scraping thousands of stores that don't have APIs.
It's a pretty interesting problem, but to be honest I never could see it as a product in and of itself. A lot of people have tried. Some spun it as a way to track things you've already bought in case you might be able to get a refund/rebate when the price dropped, which was a nice spin on the idea. But, to my knowledge none of these services have taken off.
Fundamental to all of this is that if you want to launch a consumer service and have it "take off" you need to figure out distribution first. If the idea doesn't have "social built in" and if you don't have lots of money to spend on advertising and marketing (which, in the consumer space is considerably more than if you're in the b2b space) it's Really Difficult to get attention.
That's the biggest thing I'd recommend to anyone in the consumer space... before you build it, figure out how people are going to hear about it. Most of the consumer business models require millions of users to pay off (ads, freemium, affiliate, etc). So, no million users, no business. Andrew Chen wrote a great article about how programmers can (and should) mitigate that problem these days: http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study/
http://andrewchenblog.com/2007/11/22/why-bloggers-and-press-dont-matter-for-user-acquisition/
Interesting contrarian viewpoint. I don't agree with it entirely (the truth always lies somewhere in the middle) but the important takeaway is that active promotion is expensive as hell (either time or money).
I'd say the most important thing is to BE WORTH TALKING ABOUT. If you're yet another project management app or bugtracker, this is challenging. Have a twist, have a story.
Next, try to find a viral loop (read more Andrew Chen if you think your app has potential here... Most don't).
Be an SEO genius. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Learn about direct response marketing (best way is going to marketingexperiments.com and playing the adwords / landing page game). This only works if you have a product to sell, of course... Unless you want to play arbitrage games, which have gotten harder.
The trick is (after a very brief push for your spike of attention and accompanying SEO-juicing backlinks) to find a systemic way for business to come to YOU.