I have touched on this before but I wanted to take a moment to do a bit of a deeper dive into this topic as I feel it’s one of the core problems this industry is facing as it goes through its maturity.
Today we are seeing companies of all types, sizes, and markets starting up. From the little two person shops with great products to the larger investor-funded corporations with grand ideas. The one thing that I am seeing is a lot of web-based service companies that are launching with no real world value.
It’s one thing if you are launching an online mail based video service that retains absolutely no in-house stock of the videos like Netflix, but its another thing if you’re just playing copycat.
Some of the most successful ventures I have seen involve identifying a need and filling it. Our job as web professionals extends beyond just doing the work. If we have built a reputation as web experts or even just web professionals we should be looking at the full picture.
Now, if you run a web agency it may not be part of your job to tell your client how to run their business, but it is critical that you fully understand how their business works before you can identify a true solution to what problems that client may be facing with their web site. If you are a business owner who is about to launch a web service or has an idea about launching a web service then you should read carefully here.
Filling the Need
Lets take a step back here and revisit that issue of finding a need and filling it. We all know that not everyone can be first to market, someone always has to cross that milestone before the others, that’s not to say we should be releasing products that do nothing better than what the competition has to offer. This is exactly one of the reasons why so many companies failed in the dot-com era.
It’s important to ask the “so what?” question. If you are launch a new web site that provides a service, always ask “so what?” If a web site can’t explain why it’s better than the competition in the first paragraph on the home page then it will most likely not succeed.
Sure, start-up business are nimble and can make minor course corrections and attempt to re-invent their business model or product idea to solve this issue, but that only gets you so far so fast. It’s the difference between what’s a business and what’s a remarkable business.
Being Remarkable
What makes a remarkable business is quite an amazing thing. You know you are looking at something remarkable when you see it. Very few times over the past several years have I seen any web services that I consider remarkable. I am talking about something that really changes lives and solves real world problems that we deal with every day.
I am not going to go into detail about how one comes up with ideas that are remarkable, Seth Godin has already written the book on that one. However, I can say that I think it’s time we all take a step back and look at what we’re building on the web and ask ourselves “So what?”
Some Questions to Ask
Here are a few things we can all ask ourselves about the products and services we are launching via the web:
- Does it really solve a problem?
- Does it do it better than the competition?
- Why and how does it do it better?
- Is it something that everyone can use?
- Does it make people’s life easier?
- Is it easy to use without any instructions?
- Do people who use it consider it remarkable?
Not all of the answers to these questions have to be yes. Sometimes web services focus on a specific niche market, sometimes it doesn’t make life easier but it’s a necessity, etc. This is not an article that should be taken as gospel, instead I wrote it just to get people who are considering launching a new web service to start thinking about the practicality of what they are introducing into the world. Think about the people who would use the service first.
As always, your comments are right on! Fantastic article. I certainly hope that our shop’s products and services are able to pass this “remarkability test”.
Power to the people. The net will continue to revolutionize the way we do business. Web 2.0 is just getting started. It is bigger, better and stronger the web 1.0. I hope that everyone has something to offer this revolution.
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Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch. –Tim Berners-Lee—
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What a nice, to the point, article. I wish more web business owners would read it - it relates not just to web services, but to all kinds of businesses.
That being said, however, some web services can be build around simplifying certain tasks, information aggregation and meshing, this sort of stuff. Such services are, however, much more easily duplicated and removed, if the data sources implement their functionality.
Good article! Regards :)