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I think it's also a misconception about how products get users. Going into this thing, I really thought it was all word of mouth. After all, that's how Google
by swimorsinka 11y ago
I think it's also a misconception about how products get users.
Going into this thing, I really thought it was all word of mouth. After all, that's how Google exploded.
And I didn't realize that 99/100 people might not like what you built, but that 1/100 is enough to support a successful product.
But you need sales and marketing to find that 1/100.
- brianwawok 11y agoSome of it is a B2B vs B2C difference. A lot of the big apps we think of like Facebook and Google started as B2C.. where viral marking and word of mouth is what you need. If your startup is some enterprise product that cost $1000 a month.. or a small business app that cost $100 a month.. you are unlikely to get word of mouth users, and need to actually go down the sales route in one way or another.
- adventured 11y agoIt was also easy to convince users in 1998 to try a new search engine at least once. It's one click, zero commitment. At the time the majority of people still weren't using the Web regularly, so you're acquiring users from a rapidly expanding base; people that had no allegiance or bias in relation to an existing search engine. Further, AltaVista & Co sucked big time. Sifting through the volumes of spam in pre-Google search engines was a real pain. Starting a Web/mobile email client today? Nearly everyone already has an email address, and they've likely had it for a long time. They're comfortable, they have a large index of emails at their current service, and eg Gmail is a 'good enough' product for most users. Extremely different scenario vs the one Google faced.