Most of the first half of 2005 was getting my knee diagnosed and fixed and helping establish the Feedcorp business. The second half of 2005 included 986 blog posts, shepherding gnoos.com.au thru the build stage, and building a team and finding partners for our ancillary structured blogging project. (the more local structured rss feeds in our index the better)
Scarily though, by the end of December 2005, the business was still not a business. The hard work had been done, in company incorporation, seed capital, product planning, team recruiting and so on. But it wasnt a business, and it might not have stayed around. The difference with startups and corporate, is (in a startup) you need to fight everyday just to survive. And then you have to get to the next milestone (earlier and ahead) without screwing it up.
January 2006, Renai mentioned us on ZDNet, I'd been speaking to Nik (and others like PaulM) and traction started to happen; In startups things are never as good or bad as they seem. From February to May 2006 lots of technology was (re)built/extended based on our market assessment, and externally the Aussie Web 2.0 market went into hyperspeed behind the scenes. 2005 dead market. 2006 bang !!!
Fastforward to May/June 2006 as we place structure around how we help end users / partners / + develop the platform - basically BUILD VALUE - It is very slippery; A slippery fish is how I think I summed it up to Kinger at our weekly morning coffee. And how do we continually up the ante, and deliver and exceed what we need to.
The best thing about the gnoos beta for example, has been the rigorous feedback our end users (many of whom have a blog, feed and audience:) have subjected the wildebeest to. At Sensis, the usability lab had 13 people involved in testing new websites. In Web 2.0 every blogger, and their readers are potential test analysts.
Right now in our rollout we have basic trade-offs between speed of execution vs quality, certainty of delivery vs the unknown, and how many concurrent users should we be able to satisfy before beta becomes launch; 1, 2, 10, 20, 35, 50, 100... Please feel free to add your level of launchability threshold planning scenarios.
Then you have business model issues (build revenue, ads, whitelabel enterprise revenue); You have staffing and recruitment issues, where already 2 (advisory) people involved in our business have been converted to the OH+S benefits of the multi-billion dollar public company market caps who are online aggressive once again. (which is great but i would have loved to be able to counter)
And then you need to assess whether rocket fuel would help solve some of these problems and allow you to attack/own the opportunities : After 14 months now, the opportunities, initiatives and so on dont change, just their order in the queue does. In the first 6-9 months though, there was alot of change in business scope.
I'm also really happy (at the beta stage) that the gnoos site, is the first website Ive worked on that Im proud of since I was the founding employee on carpoint.com.au when I was 24-ish.
I remember the early days of ninemsn Melbourne (circa 97-9), with Messrs Burley, Kinga, Coombes, Nicko and The Team.. and there used to be a stream of visitors doing meetings about a "partnership", "deal" blaagh etc. At the moment it feels very similar : Lots of people to talk to. But which will be the one, or what will be the combination that create a real combustive chemical reaction - where real value is created ?!
Compared to the 90's we now (personally and academically) have alot more precedents of what makes a successful digital venture. Like Hollywood though, while there may be a formula; There also isnt a formula. A me-too replication of what went before (eg "we're doing technorati in australia") is likely to fail, as much as the economic opportunity may also exist depending on whose DCF you believe.
There is a huge demand out there for real, true, authentic products. Not me-too's. The word 'authentic' in itself is fake these days. But people really want utility / not be dudded; An emotional connection with good clean design helps. The less bullshit the better eh :) Thats why Im most interested this year in delivering unqiue interpretations (downunder to start with, but globally useable) of basic tools such as Search / Browse / Create / Consume / Share.. that allow consumers to find, share and enjoy the content they want. I better finish this post. I'm wasting time.
