Erlend Wilhelmsen

Get your product out

Most of the time, our clients spend to much time messing with small details that don't matter.
You should get your product out. Kick some bugs. Make some mistakes. But always get it out!

The product you dreamed of won't work. It was a dream. This is reality. You need feedback from customers. You need to understand what they need. Then you can change it. Make it work in the real world.

Your customers are waiting for you. What are you waiting for? The perfect prototype? Head out of sand. Go!

Starting a new company?

Here's a few things I learned:

• Don't think its the idea. It's not. 500 people have that idea. It's you and your ability to get a great team together.
• Whatever you're doing, you need people who can sell shit. If you have never been in sales - get someone who has. You'll really need em.
• You need to move fast. But not because of competition. If you don't get stuff done quickly - the people following you will loose interest. That's very bad. (Of course, you'll also run out of money if you diddle around too long).
• You need at least one good advisor. Someone who actually built a profitable company and/or sold a company before. Got that person?
• Last, but not least, you need to be a really good communicator. If you can't communicate the vision with passion - you'll have a hard time selling. And that, in the end, is what it's all about: selling stuff.

Are you cut out for it? Yeah? What you waiting for?

Twitter works part-time

Apparently, the Twitter folks didn't get the "It must scale" memo. The site has been down a lot lately and it is becoming a big issue for some users. If it becomes too much to handle, have a look at Jaiku. There is little doubt that Twitter's model is hard to defend. There are virtually no barriers to entry so unless you can grow your userbase very fast (popularity) and keep the users happy - you could be yesterdays news... fast. I like Twitter. I hope they can sort their reliability problems. Hanging in there, for now.

Self-improvement tools - Part I

Several new sites offer self-improvement tools. I had a look at Traineo, MyFoodDiary, PeerTrainer, Skinnyr, and FatSecret. These are all US based and since most of the US population either seems to weight too much or would like to loose weight - this is where the money is. We'll have a brief look at two of these. First up:

FatSecret. Creating your account is quick and easy: Basic personal details, then, set goal: "loose 60 pounds." The next step is to "select your diet".

Plazes

I've had a spin around Plazes - a European based social networking site. The basic idea is for people to share places they like. Simple enough. Some nice features makes for a good foundation. However, the BETA product has some critical limitations.

For once, it's not clear why "I have to use this." I mean, there's a lot of sites out there, such as Yelp, that gives me useful information on interesting places, cafes, bars, car-repair shops. What's is the unique value in Plazes? It's possible that there is something truly unique in the combination of features, but the value is not clear upon entry and that could turn off many prospective users.

Online Social Networks are dead

Well, not exactly, but I got your attention. I told this to a client recently - mostly as a wake up call. Here's why: Every other client - even some of my friends - are talking about this or that social network (SN) Internet idea they have. I'm generally an optimistic person (I've even been called overly-optimistic); however, I'm a bit tired of it now. If you - or someone you know - are spending a lot of time thinking about starting your own Internet SN, here's a few thing you might want to consider...

Need a Travel Buddy?

Have a look at TravBuddy, a new play in the social networking space. I get the idea and I see that people would find some value in this. However, the User Interface needs a lot of work and the Google ads just makes little sense to me. If you run this venture, you want to increase average time spent on this site, right? The ads are not useful in this regard. The forums also do need some flavor. This is too dry for a travel play. Some promise here... but a long way to go.

CoRank

This start-up - CoRank - has the right idea. What your friends rank highly might be valuable to you as well. Collaborative filtering concepts like this has been difficult to get off the ground. One of the challenges is that the "perceived need" for this kind of service may not be that well understood in the mind of the consumer. Also, you'll need a large network of people to prove value unless you decide to focus on a niche. It may be worth having a second look at this in a month or so.

Sharpcast

I'm sure you've got multiple picture folders on different computers, cameras, and phones. Syncing becomes a hassle. I like this new product from SharpCast. It's got groupsync, auto-backup (thank you!), and mobile magic (which I have not tried yet, but it's said to push your camera phone photos to your desktop or your Web photo folder. There is clearly a need for this product. This company is on my "Companies to watch" list.

Share your recipes

Need a new recipe for your dinner party? Check out Group Recipes. This site is useful, it solves a real need, and its got flavor! I especially like the fact that it is possible to use the site without an account. For example, I found a recipe I liked and used the "send to my mobile phone" feature to grab it for tonight. It worked. Now, on to the cooking...