Think about it in terms of a Venn Diagram with building what users want as a big circle and inside it is a smaller circle labeled success. What you have noticed is that they don't overlap exactly. What does overlap it exactly is a profitable customer acquisition process. That is, if you can find a sustainable advertising channel that has a user acquisition cost less than your average revenue per user, then you win. If you are very very lucky, this process could of course be word-of-mouth. But in most other cases you are going to have to find or engineer a different type of process.<p>Back to the diagram. In the part of the bigger circle that isn't covered by the smaller one are unsuccessful startups that built something users wanted, but still weren't successful. This area can be grouped into traps that companies can fall into. There are many common ones. For example: (a) building something people want, but just not from you, e.g. because there are too many indistinguishable competitors and you don't win the crapshoot; (b) building something people want, but just enough of them to make a lucrative business; (c) building something people want, but they want it for free and other "business models" aren't lucrative enough. There are others too.<p>I have actually been thinking about this for a while, and am writing an in-depth essay on it, including approaches to overcoming it. However, while I was in the middle of it I got side tracked on a new startup idea :). So this is a preview. The short answer is, in my opinion, don't concentrate on "if you build it, they will come", but "if you build it, how will they come?"<p>(And to anyone reading this, I would be interested in feedback on this basic idea. It would help me make my essay better whenever I finish it.)
No, it means that building the site is not sufficient, no matter how wonderful it is, and no matter how much people who use it love it -- you also need to find a way to tell people about it.<p>One of the most brilliant examples I've seen is ravelry.com -- there's an existing online community of knitters, and the people behind ravelry.com invited a few people to test, and gave them invitations to share, much like gmail did. Shortly thereafter they built a registration queue so that they could scale up gradually. Word of mouth did the rest, and twenty thousand people signed up, either for accounts or on the waiting list.<p>
"Does it mean it will not work without VC funding?"<p>No, it means you need to work on some basic marketing. I don't know enough about this, but the other day at the grocery store I was thinking, "will these people around me want what I'm building?"<p>As for names, reddit means you have read it. Digg means you dig it, in the hipster sense of liking something. They aren't just a name with a dot-com. <p>But don't waste too much time trying to think of a name -- unless you already have a product ready.
Interesting take, epi0Bauqu. I think many hackers struggle with this concept because we are so focused on the creation, that once the product is created we are not sure what's next. And even if we do know, it oftentimes isn't as aligned with our core skills as the creation part is.
okay lets for instance take a blog which I have coded and designed. I need to make it popular by giving it for free, ofcourse they will have to have their own servers etc. But what exactly will the users want? will they want their blog to be very easy to use, yes. will they want their blog to load quickly and have some and not zillion templates yes. this is the tip of the iceberg, how will i know what they are looking for exactly, the real reason to choose a blog.<p>The only reason I coded and designed my blog is because I was getting tired of wordpress frequent outages and customization. In the process I learnt php and various other factors in setting up to get to know people.