If you are trying to build a website, what elements of the site will determine whether you are successful or fail? Can technology alone make a product in a crowded market space? If you have a good product, can sales alone make it into a market leader? I’ve had cause to think about this a lot, and have come up with a model which I believe explains the building of a web business in reasonable and simple terms.
There are four stages of development that can almost be focused on in a cycle. Innovation; Content Acquisition; Audience Acquisition (and Marketing); and Sales (and Marketing).
Innovation is all about product design and development, business cases, technical design and a lot of consultation with stakeholders. Sales people, tech people, product people, representatives of the target market. A lot of people. If you subscribe to Getting Real then this stage should be kept short, with a focus on the minimum possible deliverable that could be put out and still be useful. If you are more into Scrum or Agile software development, this is where you would review and descope to get to a small deliverable, you’d go through a few sprints / iterations, and get something to go live with. For innovation-inspiration check out The Art of Start video with Guy Kawasaki, and check out his blog. Head on over to Seth Godin’s blog, and get yourself a copy of The Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin too.
Content Acquisition is of most significance for content-based sites, like media sites. Nobody will post in your new forums if they are empty. Nobody will advertise on your new site if it’s bone-dry. Nobody will use your novel new concept one-of-a-kind technologically innovative lightning fast website if it looks or feels dead. Head on over to Creating Passionate Users for some inspiration in this light (hopefully that blog will get back to its former glory). While your product is still in development you should be looking ahead to how you will source content. I’ve recently seen a site with massive backing come unstuck for not factoring content acquisition into the business model. It’s not a pretty thing to be a part of. I was also a part of the team that originally sat and posted like maniacs to get cracker.com.au off the ground, and it was without a doubt the content we pushed into the site that made it work.
Audience Acquisition is where you start working on getting people to your site. If you are building a business that is based on a large audience this is where you hit the SEO like there’s no tomorrow. Start forking out for the SEM if you have a budget. Engage a good marketing person if you don’t have one. Talk to friends with MBAs if you have. Build yourself a marketing plan. Spend some time on SEOmoz and seobook. Check out the Sitepoint Forums, specifically the forum on Promotion Techniques
Sales and Marketing is an area where you will need real gun top-performers. It’s easy to sink a lot of money into a bad salesman before you know whether or not (s)he can perform. If you are a good salesman, start off hitting the streets yourself. If you’re not, try to find someone through your network and get a personal reference off someone you know where possible. If you employ a salesman make sure you can terminate of he doesn’t hit his kpi’s. However you approach sales, if your site requires sales as part of its business model you should get a good sales strategy in place, start off using a CRM system immediately, and get the sales process rolling so that you can move your focus around without losing sales momentum. If you are a very small business with essentially a one-man salesforce I’d recommend having a look at Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager. If you are looking at a higher-end CRM package and you are a .net shop Microsoft Dynamics CRM is worth investigating.
The point behind this “model” is that you should be able to turn your attention from one component to another without stopping. You should have the right team in place (even if it is a team of one) to allow you to get enough momentum in one area to keep it going. You should be able to get the innovation going, working to an agreed outcome. That work should proceed while you jump ahead to content acquisition or audience acquisition or sales without needing to check back in too often. If you were going to syndicate content, you should be able to get content acquisition negotiations completed and charge a team with executing to plan, while you move on to working on an audience acquisition strategy. You should be able to get the audience acquisition rolling and move on to sales and marketing while you are comfortable relying on the audience growth proceeding as planned (and as you are told by frequent reports).
In this model, one might be tempted to say “x is the most important part of the cycle”. Whatever one said “x” was would be wrong. This is like arguing which part of a horse makes it a good worker – the head, the heart, the legs or the back. The parts cannot work atomically. Good jockeys wouldn’t want to ride a horse with anything less than the best of all four. To succeed you need to understand that technology is only one piece of the puzzle. The same goes for marketing. And product management. And Sales.
The information highway is littered with the corpses of web businesses that were built by people who thought there was an easy way, a one-step (usually technology) solution. And if you cannot tolerate failure then you probably don’t have what it will take to succeed.
I synced my pda with my new laptop and somehow managed to duplicate a lot of my contacts. I had been meaning to get to tidying it up but just hadn’t made the time. A few days ago I tried to get my old LG phone to sync with Outlook, and the rubbish sync software crashed twice during the sync. both times created all my phone contacts in Outlook before crashing. My contacts were a mess. This freebie we found on a quick Google search – Outlook Contacts Scrubber – is a gem. The user interface is very clunky, but bear in mind it’s free. The preferences let you choose how you want to dedupe, with some advanced options disabled unless you buy the premium version. The software confirms each merge and lets you tweak the actions it will take by selecting which fields to keep in the merge. If you have a big old collection of contacts like I had, this tool is worth a look
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