Launch means Birth: Parent your Infant

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Launch means Birth: Parent your Infant

Thanks to Ohours and the time I’ve had between startups, I’ve been meeting with many, many founders who seek insights into youth media, the restaurant space, or the movie industry.

Clearly the flavor of the latest Internet epoch (circa 2009-present) is the platform. Today I met with a company that has not launched, has no users, but does have the requisite API. At one level, I understand. Our industry is deeply interconnected. Platforms have greatly lowered the cost of entry for startups and certainly Facebook Connect and Oauth have made it faster to launch dozens of services.

But what might be lost in this rush to be a platform is a startup’s birth and obsession with that other constituency that is even more important than developers: USERS.

My former colleague Nate Westheimer wrote an excellent and under-read post on the importance of the first 100 users and if you are launching a service you should read it. Paul Graham has written extensively on the importance of obsessing over building something people really want.

Your startup is an infant at launch. You have to nurture it and care for it round the clock. It’s not self-sustaining. One developer told me,

I know what you mean. Sometimes I feel like my code just pukes on me.

Funny.

Startups need to narrow your focus to making your infant love you by giving the early members tons and tons of love. For every Twitter or Instagram (insane growth rates), there are dozens (Foursquare among them) of companies that took considerably longer to engender a robust following.

Carefully select your first users.
Develop real relationships with them.
Figure out what works and doesn’t work
Start to spread the word
Don’t lose site of these users

As your userbase grows and reaches adolescence (1mm-5mm active monthlies), then maybe it’s time to give that startup some room to grow and be more independent. Maybe that’s the time to roll out the API.

Look at it this way: FourSquare is very hot and has 7mm users+. They held a huge hack day at General Assembly and many people hackers (looked like 100+ to me showed up). I’m told by numerous developers that they have a great API.

Still, how many apps have you added to FourSquare?

If Foursquare, is struggling at 7mm to get huge app traction then early stage startups should not expect to create a developer community or momentum. Spend your energy focused on your the equivalent of your infant, toddler, and child — your first 100, 10,000 and 100,000 users.