Falling Victim to the Field of Dreams
“If you build it, they will come.” So, I thought…
My last startup, Veraspot LLC, was to build high-profile websites to attract users and sell advertising. This was started in the middle of the Web 2.0 era. Venture capital was flowing, and Myspace was the one of the most trafficked site on the internet. After reading articles that Microsoft wanted to buy 100 companies, Digg’s valuation was 200 million dollars, Google bought YouTube for 1.5 billion dollars, and Facebook’s valuation was an estimated 15 billion dollars, I was going to be a billionaire by the following year!
What did I build?
My business partner and I built a website that allowed users to ask questions so that they could gauge other’s opinions. I was hoping the website would generate valuable discussion and insight on the way that others think. The website is pollsit.com. The site is essentially, Digg, but for polls. It even allows you to put the poll widgets on your own site! We were very proud of our creation! We told some of our friends and we told some of our friend’s friends – we expected the site to grow in popularity like a wildfire! It didn’t. I got a few people excited about the site. That’s it.
What did I do wrong?
Well, I did a lot of things wrong actually. My main failure was that I didn’t market the website. I didn’t generate buzz about the site. I didn’t get a lot of people excited. As Jeff Atwood and Steve Yegge say “marketing is the one thing every software engineer should know.” Jeff says:
This is painful for developers to hear, because we love code. But all that brilliant code is totally irrelevant until:
- people understand what you’re doing
- people become interested in what you’re doing
- people get excited about what you’re doing
Jeff is right. I thought the product itself was enough. Negating the fact of whether pollsit.com is actually a good product or not, I should have spent a lot of time promoting it! In fact, that should have been my main focus after the product was built. Instead, I kept adding features and tweaking the code. Finally, I got sidetracked by a life issue and the site has been stagnant since it was released a little over a year ago.
Are you falling victim to the field of dreams?
