What is It?
Lil’Grams is a real-time baby book designed to make it absolutely simple for parents to capture the precious moments of their baby’s life and share it with their family and friends instantly. If you like to draw comparisons, you might consider some of the names early reviewers have come up with:

• Twitter for Parents
• Pownce for Parents
• Dogster for Babies

I’m flattered to be compared to such well executed tools and communities and hope we’ll live up to the excitement that surrounds all our friends there. That said, we’re also quite different - perhaps the story behind it explains why.

Background

Eleven months ago, I was given the greatest gift imaginable, my son Aiden. It was, to say the least, life changing and has given me a new perspective on many, many things - large and small. Today, I am giving him the best thing I can imagine, a living memory book that celebrates his life and my love for him.

When I first got the idea for Lil’Grams, I was overflowing with excitement and lacked the right vehicle to vent through. As a social media enthusiast, I naturally considered a number of different options before deciding to build my own.

• Blogs - my first consideration was a blog, but it just felt wrong to me. As someone who’s blogged for years now, I knew that a blog was a lot of work and tends to make you feel bad when you don’t post.
• Twitter - Twitter, was really interesting as they were lightweight and had an awesome mechanism for notification, but it felt too open to me - yes I know I can make my updates private, but having two accounts was a hassle and more than I thought I wanted to suffer through
• Email - I was equally willing to consider just mailing out updates as thousands of parents do already but that’s just ridiculous - there’s no real archive.

No matter what I found that could be hacked in one way or another, none of them really got my needs as a parent.

Solving My Real Problems

As a first-time father, I’m essentially a fanatic. If you’re not one yet, or had the opportunity to be around a baby from its birth, you might not get what I mean - so you’ll have to take my word for it (for now). As a truly obsessed person, you tend to want to take lots of notes, pictures, videos and everything else. At the same time, you’re also very inclined to want to tell people all about your bundle of joy.

My Memories, My Way
One major problem is that lots of tools tell you what you are supposed to care about. The printed baby books come with pre-assigned slots for your baby’s milestones. Naturally, these are supposed to be the “big” moments in a baby’s life - but there’s far more than that and no place to put them. Blogs and related tools, while being more flexible, are equally abstract. None of the blogging or microblogging tools understood that the things I wanted to keep track of had special meaning to me and my family.

As a parent, it was easy to see the types of things I was keeping track of. We call these little nuggets Lil’Grams since they are short messages about baby’s life. There are six of them right now for tracking things like growth, foods, firsts and pictures too funny to lose. Of course, we don’t think we’ve got them all just yet, but we’ve designed it so we can add more whenever it makes sense.

Always Ready
When you’re chasing the baby around, time at the computer is a luxury. Many, many parents I’ve met have a physical baby book that they received as a gift. Most of them haven’t completed the book in any meaningful way. Why? Accessibility. Most parents don’t have the book around them all the time which means they have to remember to go back. Unfortunately, remembering to do things like that become harder and harder with time - have you seen how fast a baby can creep?

One goal we had with Lil’Grams was make it as accessible as possible. We decided from the beginning that we would support publishing from as many places as possible. The initial version starts out with web posting only, but we’ll shortly roll out posting from everywhere.

Built in Bragging
Now let’s not kid ourselves - you’re a mom or dad and your kid is the best. That’s what every parent has told me :) Kidding aside, we’re all proud of our babies and we want to share the love with our friends and family. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called, emailed, or physically harassed by someone I consider a friend because I haven’t posted enough pictures of Aiden or given them an update on what he’s doing. There’s no shortage of pride, just one of time.

It’s hard work getting your memories down and even harder work pushing pixels out to friends and family. We built Lil’Grams so that you don’t ever have to worry about telling people (or about annoying them with the details you’re obsessed with). When you sign up, you build your own little private network for the baby and invite them to share in the fun. Once they’re in, they get updates (at whatever interval they want) when you post new updates - plain and simple.

Manage the Media
Not the kind coming after you for pictures of your baby, but the thousands of pictures and videos we take. For example, right now I don’t have a highlight reel of my favorite pictures of Aiden. I have started to put them into Flickr, organized as best I can, but that’s not really giving me the “Best Of” reel in any way.

We tackled this problem by letting parents associate photos and videos with their memories. During this alpha, we’re only focusing on photos and specifically photos from Flickr since we love them and they have the best API. Soon in the future, you’ll see lots more sources for your photos to come from and it’s all pretty seamless.

Two Applications for the Price of One

As we go ahead with this alpha, we’re releasing just a couple of the tools we’ve got planned. Here’s the details:

Baby Book
The Baby Book is your real-time publishing platform for baby’s memories, no matter how big or small. It tracks of all those cool details with ease and keeps your friends and family in the loop.

Shoebox
This is your digital media manager. If you’ve got photos or videos out there (be they in your own account or with friends) we’ll help you wrangle them into one place and rise the cream to the top.

All of our tools are completely private and not open to the general public. I hate creeps and don’t want them any closer to my son than I want them to yours.

Calling All Parents

Today, we’re announcing the start of our private Alpha. We’re looking for excited parents everywhere, though we’ve got a special place in our hearts for parents who use Flickr and Twitter at the moment.

You can sign up in the top right corner of our temporary home page: http://littlegrams.com.

Special Thanks

Special thanks go out to Daniel, Susie, Bernie, Ranvir, Shikha, Arjun, David, all the parents who’ve provided input and to my happy little boy Aiden for not breaking all the keys off the computer so daddy could write this post.

Technorati Tags: aiden, baby, bluewhalelabs, greg+narain, media+sharing, memories, moms, parents, littlegrams, puppy, social+media, twitter

Inside Facebook speculates that Facebook may be in the process of adding Friend Lists, aka Buddy Lists aka Contact Groups to a future release of the platform:

The two new API methods are:

friends.getLists
friends.getListsMembers

Based on these method names, “Friend Lists” could be buddy lists that you might use to organize your friends. For example, “Work Friends” or, say… “Top Friends”.

If these are indeed upcoming features of the Facebook Platform, I think this has two major implications:

1. This could dramatically simplify privacy controls. Right now, users manage privacy settings per-feature or by managing their Limited Profile list. The addition of Friend Lists means one can now much more flexibly and powerfully manage privacy settings per List. Work friends see one portion of your profile, personal friends see another, best friends see yet another.

This will be a welcome change for everyone whose LinkedIn networks have migrated to Facebook. Consequently, this could mean accelerated LinkedIn attrition: per-Friend-List privacy settings could substantially decrease the need of many to actively maintain their LinkedIn accounts as well.

2. More significant, this would mark the first time Facebook has moved to directly compete with a top Platform application.

Source: Inside Facebook, “Speculation: Facebook adding Friend Lists; implications for Top Friends, LinkedIn?”

I’ll take the second part first, since I think it matters less. Anyone who has been paying attention to Facebook should have known that it:

1. has always had the option to make whatever it wants, even if inspired by an app on the platform
2. was probably on the long-term roadmap for Facebook for some time
3. should not be a surprise to anyone

In contrast, the first point about privacy and security is much more interesting to me, probably since I’ve been talking about it for years now (at least since March 2004) and it’s nice to see it making it into the usable, at scale realm:

SNS 1.0 is at risk from another powerful force, however. Although the feature sets of these tools will often fail to accommodate user’s needs, a far more fundamental problem may exist in the very foundations. As mentioned we all interact within different social zones and contexts. As mentioned, our circles are interconnected and often linear (although promotions and demotions can be accelerated for any arbitrary reason). I call this the Social Context Continuum. Relationships evolve, or devolve, over time. As more information is exchanged, the bonds change based on a number of criterion — trust being near the top of that list.

The dilemma is two-fold. One the one hand, there are not enough “shades” for tinting relationships in the current systems. Degree-based systems are meaningful only in term of understanding graphs. However, they do nothing to indicate affinity or opportunity. Graduated scales, going from Enemy to Friend only serve to collapse the value of categories as a whole — much like the junk drawer in most everyone’s kitchen which becomes a convenient catch-all for hard to place items.

On the other hand, the positioning of SNS is problematic to its long-term unevolved survival. For some users, SNS provides a unique social environment that encourages and develops new relationships. For others, the potential of SNS to create business opportunities provides significant value. Unfortunately, the quest for ubiquity at the same level as e-mail or cell phone address books is extremely difficult to pass, at least by current standards.

In the end, these two forces will come together and result in a growing sense of frustration for users. This frustration will stem from the inability to manage more of their network from a single location. The result will be that users will be forced to maintain identities in numerous locations without the ability to easily leverage previously efforts. Some may argue this will prove to be a much smaller problem than it seems, however, we live in a culture of consolidation and where time and other pressures continuously drive us towards new forms of “efficiency”.

Source: SocialTwister, “The SNS Differentiation Challenge”

Interestingly enough, Facebook could have the requisite level of engagement and momentum to materialize the “Social Context Continuum” for a large part of the internet populous.

Technorati Tags: f8, facebook, facebook+applications, social+architecture, social+networking, socialcontextcontinuum

There’s some very interesting discussion circling now about the use of channels in Twitter. Most every Twitter user is well aware that groups are a fundamentally lacking feature in the system - perhaps it’s a strength, not a weakness.

Chris Messina has prepared what can only be described a working specification for the implementation of Channels, a la IRC, in Twitter. There are some great observations, so I recommend reading the whole post. For the unwilling, here’s a few useful excerpts:

What I’ve realized is that this “channel” concept meets many of the aggregate desires expressed in various “Groups for Twitter” discussions while not inheriting a lot of the unnecessary management cruft that most group systems seem to suffer from, it is easily accessible adapting current Twitter syntax and convention, it’s easy to learn and lightweight, it’s very flexible and entirely folksonomic and works with people’s current behaviors, rather than forcing anyone to learn anything radically new. It also keeps the interface aspects to a minimum (as I’ll soon explain), invents little by borrowing from age old IRC conventions also adopted by an existing web application and, from what Britt said so far, actually works consistently on cell phones (whereas, for example, the star key does not).

[…]

Every time someone uses a channel tag to mark a status, not only do we know something specific about that status, but others can eavesdrop on the context of it and then join in the channel and contribute as well. Rather than trying to ping-pong discussion between one or more individuals with daisy-chained @replies, using a simple #reply means that people not in the @reply queue will be able to follow along, as people do with Flickr or Delicious tags. Furthermore, topics that enter into existing channels will become visible to those who have previously joined in the discussion. And, perhaps best of all, anyone can choose to leave or remove topics that don’t interest them.

Source: “Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels”, Factory Joe

I’m quite keen on the notion of “metaprogramming” against the Twitter OS - largely related to the various hooks we’ve built for LittleGrams. Curious if Chris’ model could work, I attempted to setup an account to no avail. Chris’ approach relies on the # (pound) symbol as the marker that a channel tag is ahead. Unfortunately, there is an implicit meaning to the # in URI-based systems which could be a source of conflict going forward.

But wait! Twitter does allow us to register names that have the _ in them. To give this a try, I’ve registered _littlegrams on Twitter. I’ll attempt to use this as a channel for making announcements regarding the product - the actual littlegrams account is used for posting to the application. I am ok with the signal that an _ is meant to be channel as opposed to @ being direct.

That being said, I’m just not sure I want this in my stream in general. I see Stowe’s taken to using them in his tweets but I find the whole affair a bit messy. Twitter serves up too small a triscuit for any real meat - and that’s a strength, not a weakness. In fact, what I would prefer to see is some pre-processing happen on messages. Let me explain using LittleGrams as an example.

For our system, we wanted more robust messaging via Twitter, however, for a number of reasons (efficiency, security, etc) we opted to work via direct messages. To this end, you could say that we setup a Channel Director. With our app, you send a message to the director like so:

d littlegrams word bye-bye

Our system polls for the commands and then is able to parse that into two distinct things: an instruction on what to publish and a notification back out to the network. If we were to adopt this to the current problem set, I might be able to do this:

d _channel #barcamp #chris+messina Can’t wait to get to the Block!

As we’re doing, a processor for _channel could be setup (or Twitter could offer one) that was able to make the channel descriptors into metadata instead of direct data. The message that would be broadcast out to those individuals following either of these channels would be a short, cruft-free message:

Can’t wait to get to the Block!

The other thing I like about this approach is that it quarantines someone’s accounting work. While tagging is a great thing that continues to subvert systems everywhere, I think it is still largely personal. That may fit well with the nature of most Tweets today, but is that the future?

I think that all the other mechanisms Chris has are awesome and could easily see them working out well, especially if the fine folks at Twitter can make the dream into a reality.

That’s my 20 cents. For some more background, check out Stowe and Brian’s posts.

Technorati Tags: brian solis, channels, chris messina, groupings, littlegrams, stowe boyd, twitter

It’s been quite some time since I’ve had enough spare time to even think about the URL for my blog. We’ve been overwhelmed with work at Blue Whale Labs for the last few months and that has quickened to a near-death pace in the last several weeks as we pushed out projects for some of our clients. I will blog about that separately as they deserve their own time and place.

At the same time, I have been toiling in the background on a new secret application that’s been described as many things:

• Dogster for Babies
• Facebook for Parents
• Pownce for Parents
• Twitter for Babies

I don’t think I have a favorite - I like them all. The project is truly a labor of love, driven more and more by the obsessive pursuits of a first-time father. I started thinking about the app back in February (though I had another version of it in mind a couple of years ago). It wasn’t until May that I undertook the building process in earnest. Unfortunately, setbacks run wild and borrowed cycles from an ever-increasingly-busy development team has made it a bit harder to get things done in the time I would have liked.

To help push me in the right direction (and to get a little good old-fashioned buzz going), I decided to enter the TechCrunch20 competition. I’m sure most of you are aware, but it’s like a smaller scale Demo event sans the expensive fees. Mike Arrington and Jason Calcanis organized the event and now share that role with Heather Harde. There was some fierce competition, to be sure. It seems there were close to 700 applications, no doubt accelerated by the $50,000 prize that will be awarded to first place.

It’s going to be a great event, I am sure. I say that just a little disheartened, of course, since we won’t be on stage. Announcements went out via e-mail today to the winners and, erm, the losers. Needless to say, a nice note from Heather dropped into my inbox this afternoon. Ahh well, that’s how these things go. I’ll spare the details of what happens to those of us who lose. I do look forward to see how has made it into the 20 - I think that’s reward enough, to be honest. In due time, I am sure they will make a formal announcement on their own.

So now I’m in the 21+ crowd. It doesn’t buy you much, but you’ve got to toss your card in the hat if you want to play the game. And play on we will.
Update: So I guess it’s even worse than originally anticipate. Apparently they selected 100 semi-finalists, and no, we weren’t even in that group. Now that is depressing.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurship, events, heather harde, jason calcanis, michael arrington, techcrunch, techcrunch20, web2.0

Facebook applications are experiencing tremendous growth, for better or worst. It’s not often we get to look at a set of truly astonishing numbers compressed into such a short period of time. InsideFacebook, a blog that has grown to be near the center of this emerging world, has a summary on the growth in the past month.

We’ve gathered data from all the top apps on Facebook now that we’re one month into Platform, and one thing’s clear: Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire. In fact, to the tune of 65 million net application installs over the course of the past 30 days. That’s an average of 2.5 installed applications per every registered Facebook user. And I may even be missing some.

20 applications now sport over 1 million Facebook users. 35 more have over 100,000.

Source: InsideFacebook, “Facebook users add 65 million apps in first month - average of 2.5 per person”

While most are intrigued by the opportunity, it’s not entirely clear if the universe of applications will ultimately serve as a platform for doing business. Some companies, however, aren’t waiting to find out. So far, there have already been 2 acquisitions for Facebook applications. ReadWriteWeb outlines these purchases noting that, so far, the cited reasons are largely to acquire users or talent. The conclusion puts a finger on the pulse of this matter:

So will Facebook acquisitions continue? I think that’s probably highly likely. With more than 38,000 developers already using the Facebook Developer app (which helps you create applications for the platform), buying popular apps is a good way for companies looking to get into the Facebook ecosystem to screen developers. And with the Facebook platform continuing to grow in popularity among its rapidly expanding user base, it seems inevitable that companies will try to buy their way to the top, especially given the relatively cheap price of purchasing Facebook apps (Favorite Peeps, for example, was had for only just over US 4 cents per user).

Source: ReadWriteWeb, “Facebook Acquisitions: Fad or Proof of Platform Success?”

I’m not sure that I would expect the valuation for users to remain consistently low. If anything, would estimate that as the nature of applications evolve into, well, more traditional applications, and developers loose their stage fright regarding monetizing their actions, that the lifetime value of a user will increase significantly. I can say for sure we’re making that bet.

Technorati Tags: f8, facebook, facebook applications, facebook+applications, ilike, monetization, slide

Just a short month ago, Facebook made its new development platform, F8, open to the public and with it came the beginnings of a cottage industry of micro application development. The success stories are quite amazing, no matter what scale you consider it at. On the one hand, there are a dozen or so apps with 1M+ users already and growing. On the other hand, there are hundreds of applications that have been adopted by many thousand users. As an application developer, the notion of launching an application built in just a few weeks and seeing huge adoption is both exciting and frightening at the same time.

Of course, getting that many “users” in that short a period of time is somewhat suspect, no matter how you count it. We’re more accustomed to this type of growth in things are are either highly fashionable (think Tamagachi, ipods) or highly utilitarian (think vaccines, technologies). In certain circles, software, services, and the combination of the two) are often trumpeted by waves of early adopters. It’s this particular pocket that’s most curious.

Paul Kedrosky raises the specter of this in his recent post, “Option F and the Facebook 500,000″:

Around this time last year Josh Kopelman came up with the idea of the Techcrunch chasm. The root idea is/was that too many companies were targeting the then-53,651 readers of Mike A’s popular Techcrunch blog. A good review in Techcrunch, as Josh pointed out, gets you 5-25k beta users, and then you’re stuck.

I’m wondering if something similar isn’t happening in Facebook. I keep hearing about companies that are exercising “Option F” and launching a Facebook version of their app, only to suddenly have 500,000 users. But for how long? I’m betting, pace the Techcrunch chasm, that those people are an ephemeral crew, and that they try pretty much anything, and then drop it again.

I see that behavior quite clearly in my Facebook news feed. People all add one app; people all drop that app. Repeat, repeat, repeat. This is not a mainstream audience, nor does it seem to have much permanence. It’s just tire-kickers and try-ers.

Source: Paul Kedrosky, “Option F and the Facebook 500,000″

Indeed, there probably is a great deal of tire-kicking going on with loads of applications, but the rate of decay is not clear. While it’s not a bad bet that something which grows with meteoric rates will burn back down to something much smaller over time, the unique circumstances of Facebook applications may work to preserve the scale. Specifically, while other applications build their audiences, they require that we, the user, go to a variety of different destinations to participate. With Facebook, we largely broadcast our usage and the stream of incidents that define our involvement. This town-sqaure, gossip-oriented model seem to create a different set of wrappers on how we approach our usage:

• You can be an early adopter by discovering and app first amongst your network of friends (a network you don’t need to invite over and over to prove you made a discovery).
• Your usage is not only informative, but competitive. When everyone sees as you do, they can learn quickly about what drives you. When groups of friends emulate, there’s often a bit of one-upsmanship to see who can find the more interesting resources to lasso into the mix or who can most cleverly make use of something already assigned a “purpose.”

• Your interest in a subject matter is perpetuated by your peers’ involvement and usage

I think with time we will know quite a bit more about the usage patterns and the usage intervals, but for now, it’s an interesting new pasture that we’ve been given to graze in.

Technorati Tags: f8, facebook, paul kedrosky

I don’t know Derek Powazek personally, I just know of him. Reading his post today really makes me hope that some day I have the chance to meet him in person. Derek is a very talented designer and most recently co-founded 8020 Publishing which produced community-driven media such as JPG.

On his blog today, he tells the back story to his recent departure from the baby he helped get off the ground. While the story of JPG is compelling and worth the read, I think the points he takes away from the experience are the most important:

If it’s any help to other entrepreneurs, here’s what I’ve learned.

Make no assumptions when it comes to roles and responsibilities. Like my dad says: “Someone’s gotta call quittin’ time.”
Communication between partners is mandatory. And you cannot communicate with someone who is not communicating with you.
Decisions aren’t decisions if you have to keep making them. Set on the course and stick to it. If you keep talking about things that have already been decided, nothing will ever get done.
When someone says one thing, but acts in a contradictory way, you have a choice between believing their words or believing their deeds. Believe their deeds.
Never let anyone tell you what you want. When someone says, “You don’t want that,” what they really mean is, “I don’t want you to have that.”
Don’t stay where you’re not wanted, respected, or happy. Even if it’s your company.

Source: powazek.com, “The Real Story of JPG Magazine”

As a fellow entrepreneur, I certainly can relate to the ups and downs of inter-company relationships. Some start out rocky and get progressively worst while others start out peachy and, well, go sour even quicker. I’ve been in all of those situations and it’s never easy, compounded even further if you work with friends.

Ironically enough, it’s this sort of salty advice that is really the most compelling you can find. There’s a quote I once heard: “Reporter: So how’s it feel to be an overnight success? Entrepreneur: It’s great, I just don’t know which night it was.” Success is one of the hardest things to replicate in life but failures are easier to avoid (not that we don’t continuously find new ways to fail either).

Technorati Tags: jpg+magazine, startups, web2.0

Some of the big news today circles around the pending shuttering of the Yahoo! Photos site. Yahoo! Photos, wth its 2B photos, will be giving users of the service the option to migrate to its other photo property, Flickr (currently stacking about 500M photos). Interestingly, this is not a required migration path and instead Yahoo! also offers a variety on exit ramps to patrons including export to Photobucket and Snapfish.

Many in the Web 2.0 universe consider this a huge win for Flickr. I’m not so sure about that, and it’s even much less a guarantee for the Web 2.0 thinking in my book. I think the fact that there isn’t an instant migration to Flickr speaks to the power, and challenge, of establishing communities online. Ben Metcalfe has more:

And this is where the rub lies for the Yahoo! Photo users who are now contemping their options. Yahoo! does run a conceptually similar service, Flickr, however it is wildly different in it’s dynamic. Quite frankly many of the photos, and their owners, from Yahoo! Photos would not be welcome in Flickr’s high-quality, open, community-orientated environment.

Yahoo! has enough smart people to realize this and so it is for that reason they have turned down the otherwise lucrative opportunity of simply merging all those photos into Flickr to create the biggest photo site on the net (2.5bn photos).

Source: Ben Metcalfe Blog, “When your assets are no longer monetizable: Yahoo! Photos to close”

I think that the victor here is Flickr. I agree with Ben that Flickr’s ability to capture customers that love the service enough to part ways with their hard earned cash is the leading motivation. I believe the focus on the customer is certainly a tenet of Web 2.0. However, another tactical hallmark of this new suite of applications is the ad-driven revenue model. To that end, I think this move should serve as a serious wake-up call to the peril of building real, lasting value (the kind people pay for with more than just their time) early.

As a side note, I used Yahoo! Photos for the first time in a long time recently to order prints. It was a really easy experience and one that is not matched by Flickr’s. Hopefully more of it will be integrated.

Technorati Tags: flickr, media+sharing, ben+metcalfe, web2.0, yahoo

I got a good chuckle out of this illustration today and couldn’t resist sharing it:

Technorati Tags: web2.0

I know I am late to the conversation with this one, but Josh Kopelman has a great post discussing the differences in various business models in today’s flow of entrepreneurship.

Josh takes a look at the models that social networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube are built upon. He breaks this down into two categories: “Catch and Keep” vs “Catch and Release”. Describing them, he notes:

But what all of the most successful social networks have in common is that they’ve perfected what I like to call a “catch and keep” model. From the first time a user signs up for a MySpace, or a Facebook, they find themselves sucked into spending hours on the site, and feel compelled to both return on a regular basis, and drag their friends into their network. As recent data demonstrates, the top social networks are among the highest trafficked and stickiest sites on the web.

In sharp contrast, most social networks out there have what I call a “catch and release” model. They can generate buzz, get written up in the blogosphere, and even get 53,651 beta testers, but few of those initial users ever return to the site.

Source: “Redeye VC: “Catch and Release” Business Models”

What I find most intriguing about this, however, is not the math but the focus on the user throughout the cases studied. The empirical means of looking at this data is driven by the User Acquisition Costs. The social means of looking at this is driven by the user’s needs.

As Josh notes, the problem often with these Catch and Release models is that they put together a series of features and functions that impose on the user a suite of actions that are potentially uninteresting, unusable, or unimportant. There are a number of reasons that seem to drive this type of situation:

• Undifferentiated Advice - Many startups base their foundations on an initial itch they have. The excitement about that specific problem often leads to a myopic view of the landscape they are preparing to bridge. Without a variety in voice at the planning table, there is the all-to-easy trap of defining a problem space too narrowly.
• Business-First Mentality - Many companies choose to deal with their business model motivations first and foremost. In this case, you’ll often see a company trying to leverage an untapped opportunity - but they can only look at how to funnel people towards the opportunity. Unfortunately, people don’t like being funneled and they know when they are in one.
• Shifted Goals - Startup life is filled with rapid changes - it’s part of the excitement. At the same time, it often feels difficult, if not impossible, to make changes. Of all the entrepreneurs I’ve ever spoken to, most have one of these moments in the history of their company and almost all have some regret the didn’t “set things right” when they knew it was the time to do it.

If there’s a recurring theme here, it’s surely that a focus on your customer’s needs is tantamount to your success. It’s an obvious truth that’s often difficult to stay true to.

Technorati Tags: business+models, josh+kopelman, social networking, social+networking, trends