In late 1999 I founded a startup called Soholaunch. Fresh off of the dot-com success of that time period the vision of the company was to make it easy for the common person to create and manage a website. To this end I single handedly built what is, still to this day, arguably the most feature rich and comprehensive online web site development and management tool around. But I bet most of you reading this have never heard of it. It covers the gambit in features, capabilities and scalability. Soholaunch is still alive and well today and being run by my former partner, Mr. Jim Buckler. We are still very good friends and speak quite frequently. I walked away from Soholaunch after four years conceding that it was a failure (I really hope Jim proves me wrong). What did I learn? I learned there are three critical things that must happen for a web application to be successful (Jim this could be helpful).
1. Focus on doing one thing really well.
The Soholaunch product has so many features that it is just impossible for the company to be an "expert" in all of these areas. It's an overcooked product. The "Swiss army knife web site builder" is one of its greatest marketing assets and one of its biggest operational weaknesses. Do you know how long it takes for a sales rep to describe what Soholaunch does? An average pitch meeting or demo could be two hours long. Forget trying to educate consumers on how to use the damn thing.
You should be able to describe your product in less than two minutes from top to bottom. If not, it's probably not focused enough. Based on this description users should have a 98% ability to use the product without any education or assistance.
2. Stay true to your vision.
When we first started Soholaunch it was a hosted application. Every indication showed that thin-client computing or web-based applications were clearly the future. The problem came in mid-2000 when the dot-bomb happened. Suddenly there was a mass exodus from the Internet. The question of the day was, "what if you guys go out of business tomorrow?" This prompted us to change our development strategy. Soholaunch became (and is to this day) a product that you can download and install on any php/mysql-hosting environment. This increased support costs; increased development costs and complexity; but most of all de-valued the intellectual property. It also changed the business model, target market and vision. At that point we had to sell to developers who could install php code and manage mysql databases. The vision was changed overnight and by default impacted the entire business model.
Be flexible with your development and business model but stay true to your original vision. If you do not know where you are going then you will certainly have no idea how to get there.
3. Sell to the end user.
Using reseller channels and distributors to sell and market your web application will be a disaster. These channels will never support your product properly and you will almost never hear feedback from the end users. With Soholaunch we spent many hours modifying source code for provisioning into hosting companies. We were suddenly in the business of building custom provisioning systems for hosting companies and not being paid for the effort. This was a fatal mistake. We spent months enabling the product to be put in front of thousands of consumers and it would fail to sell. The end-user experience was awful and the hosting company had no clue how to support a web application.
Sell and market your application directly to the people who will actually consume the product. Use their direct feedback to improve your product and enhance the user experience.
