The 3 D’s of Starting Up
Editor’s note: Ming Yong is the co-founder and CEO of Socialwok, an on-demand enterprise social platform. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Voiceroute, a platform for open source unified communications. Socialwork was one of the selected pitching startups at the recent unConference Singapore 2009 event held in May 2009.
When Mohan approached me to write a guest post to share with other startups my experience in starting up, I was wondering what I could share with others about Voiceroute and now Socialwok.
One of the biggest challenge for any startup is getting your product or service out to the world with as much traction and as quickly as possible. The solution is the three Ds; distribution, distribution and distribution.
To get a little more context to my emphasis on distribution, please read the motochan blog post by my good friend James Chan. If you look at history of startups that became great companies, they all found the kaya to their white bread :) Google did keyword search for Yahoo users while Paypal was the stickiest payment system for Ebay users. Below are 4 key advice I have for all startups when it comes to thinking about distribution and how I have executed on my own advice.
1) You often gain much more when you share
Many startups are often fearful of sharing any of their technology or experiences. They are afraid that sharing will reveal their “trade secret” and remove any competitive advantage. If some basic sharing would kill your perceived “competitive advantage”, this barrier of entry against your competition is probably crap anyway.
My first product for Voiceroute was Druid; one of the world’s leading open source unified communications project built on top of Asterisk (world’s leading open source IP telephony software). Druid was initially a closed sourced graphical user interface that helped people setup Asterisk based IP phone systems. Our key challenges was marketing Druid to enough paid users and resellers who would deploy the software commercially. We took the strategic but difficult decision to open source Druid. Shortly after open sourcing in April 2008, we gained significant media coverage as well as user base. Although it still took a lot of work and time to build a critical mass of open source users, it was obvious in retrospect that we should have open-sourced it much earlier.
2) Stand on the shoulder of giants
The technology niche that your startup occupies in today’s web 2.0/3.0 world is of limited lifespan. You are lucky if that is 12 months or more. Most of the time you will have to leverage on existing technology platforms from open source projects or large players like Google and Facebook.
For our product, Socialwok for Google Apps, we decided early on to build our enterprise social cloud service using Google’s AppEngine Java, Google Data API and Google Web toolkit (GWT). Google is the obvious giant upon whose shoulder Socialwok is standing on. To increase Socialwok’s profile in the Google technology ecosystem as well as to deepen our links with Google, Socialwok became the corporate sponsor for the Singapore Google Technology User Group. We helped to lead the first SG-GTUG meetup (29 Aug 2009 at Google SG) on Google AppEngine and Google Web toolkit. For more details on the 1st SG-GTUG event, see this blog post (link here) as well as video of the whole event (link here).
We will also be presenting our experiences on Google AppEngine Java on 16 Sept 09 at Googleplex during the the Silicon Valley Java User Group September meetup. To date, the exposure and relationships we have gained to date have been quite invaluable.
3) Know as early as possible what is the true value of your product. Confirm that value by iterating with your lead users. Do not be afraid to take big leaps! It’s part of being a startup.
Your product or service will gain traction with the audience that finds the most value using it. You need to know what are the real tangible benefits that you deliver, to what type of audience and why do they like it. Whatever you think is the answer, it is probably wrong until you have confirmed it with on the ground testing. This is an an iteratively process; hypothesize the value and the type of lead user, test the use case, evolve your product and repeat.
The first version of Socialwok was a closed group enterprise microblogging tool, which we launched in May 2009 at unConference Singapore 2009. You can refer to this Socialwok blog post for more details on our experiences at the conference. Shortly after, we conducted our closed alpha trials with over 80 organizations. We observed their usage of Socialwok very closely. It is a myth that people will give feedback to help you make your service better. Most people will just use the service, get dissatisfied and stop using after a while without any feedback given. It is your responsibility to call, email and bug them until you understand what are the problems.
Fast forward 4 months to Sept 2009, we now have Socialwok for Google Apps. You can refer this article by ZDNet Asia on how Socialwok for Google Apps is filling the missing social layer for Google Apps. You can compare and contrast between both versions of Socialwok as shown by their respective demo videos below.
| Socialwok for Google Apps in Sept 2009 |
It’s a world of difference. We have made a few big strategic decisions based mainly on our intuitive of the changing technology landscape as well as a deep understanding of our own competitive capabilities. So far, things are looking good :)
As part of taking my own advice about sharing, Socialwok will be exclusively partnering with e27 to share with the Asian technology community our experiences at this year’s TC50 taking place from 14-15 September 2009 where Socialwok will be demo-ing Socialwok for Google Apps. Socialwok will be tweeting #tc50sg, Facebooking and of course video podcasting from the event. We will be doing interviews with other interesting startups, bloggers and attendees of TC50. Please tweet with the harsh tag #tc50sg to let us know what you would like us to cover. Please keep a watch out for a later post from e27.sg announcing the details of this coverage.
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