Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Passion and its role in evaluating new product ideas

  Evan Williams has an absolutely wonderful post up about evaluating a new product idea . I think Marc is spot on - the "personally compelling" criteria is the one that stands out. Last on the list, but probably the first question I ask myself is: How important to me is it that this product exists in the world? If I were evaluating a startup, I'd ask this of the founders. . . . In theory, you can get around this with lots of user research. (It's pretty clear neither Slide nor Rockyou 's founders are creating widgets based on their own needs and desires.) But you're more likely to get it wrong that way. When I've gone sideways, it's when I wasn't listening to my gut on this issue. Specifically, Blogger and Twitter were personally compelling, while Odeo wasn't. Clearly, you're better suited to build a best-of-breed product if you're intimately familiar with the space and "scratching your own itch". But perhaps more importantly, I think... Posted Dec 26 2007, 01:01 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Personal, Business, Entrepreneurship, Startup, NextNY, Notches

• Distinguishing between a platform and a destination

  Charlie says that "the whole idea that you have a main site is dead". I couldn't agree more - I strongly believe that platforms are the future of the Internet. One clarification I'd like to make in this whole discussion is Facebook is both a destination and a platform. It's important to understand that these are discrete things - something can be a platform without being a destination and vice versa. Clearly, Facebook offers a nice API for integrating your code into theirs, but this to me is not what makes Facebook a platform. MySpace, iGoogle, and a plethora of Web 2.0 portals allow you to "embed" your code - Facebook just allows you to do it more seamlessly. If anything, these are all simply platforms - or rather, vehicles - for traffic. Of course, as Charlie and myself and countless others have said, traffic does not give you a business model. On the other hand, Facebook is getting flak for not being open enough with their data . As Fred says, being open... Posted Aug 21 2007, 06:15 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Software Development, Web 2.0, Business, Blogging, Entrepreneurship, Startup, NextNY, Notches

• Outsourcing and Startups

  Lee discusses the question of whether you should outsource development for a startup . If you’re in the software business itself, including all types of web-based software, technology is absolutely key to your product. [. . . ] Great software requires more than just implementation, it requires passion and craftsmanship . These can only come from a star programmer who’s fired up about your project. I couldn't have said it better. We briefly toyed with the idea of outsourcing for our first version but quickly decided against it. In our case, the team was very technical but had serious time constraints. Some of those have eased, some have not - but in the end, we felt that the core platform and API are just too important to leave to others. These are not only key to our product, they are the product. Guy Kawasaki thinks that "for version 1.0 of a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet." Joel Spolsky generally seems to hold the... Posted Feb 21 2007, 05:25 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Software Development, Web 2.0, Entrepreneurship, Startup, NextNY, Notches