Surfarama

This post has been sitting as a draft for weeks now, but this morning Dylan Bland's post about focussing on the details prompts me to push it out there. I had been meaning to add some more thoughts, but I'll probably never get around to it so here we go, as is where is...

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Stephan posted awhile back about being turned off by uninspiring business pitches which get lost in the details...

What typically happens is that the person gets lost in the weeds - caught up in the small details such as what the site will look like or what they are going to call it. That isn’t what I want to hear. You need to be able to tell me three things... [read the rest]

Of course I totally agree about the need to be able to pitch an idea focussing on just the problems solved and the benefits delivered rather that the minutia. The point being that you really can't expect people to grok the details in the first five minutes, rather you need to get them to that 'Aha' moment so that they understand the value proposition.

That said, I also find the opposite to be true. The number of times I have had conversations with people about business ideas (typically web based) which exist only at the 30,000 foot level. Regardless of whether they can succinctly describe the business in such a way that gives me that aha! moment, I find it incredibly frustrating when they haven't thought through even the simplest of details.

Any business success always comes down to the execution, which means getting the details right, and in my experience otherwise good web ideas often fail because the user interface isn't simple or clear enough, or it was too slow, or a simple opportunity for viral trajectory was overlooked. Case in point, I recently heard what was actually a pretty neat pitch for a social network. It had a great niche focus which I can see is under served online, but which is characterized by very rich interactions offline. If someone did it right it would add an enormous amount of value to the online and offline worlds.

Problem is the people proposing the idea were not able to describe to me in any way how they intended to develop this social network, how they would enable real social interaction between particpants, or how they would engineer the network in such a way as to naturally propogate. Without this level of detail and understanding by the founders I don't think they'll be successful. They might be able to hire some good people, but they take a big risk outsourcing completely some very critical decisions...sure, they can hire UI designers etc, but I also think they need to be involved in the process and understand the consequences of decisions. My advice to them was hire a 'product manager' of some sort, someone who knows (and actually uses) the web and can own the product, engage the community for feedback, and get right stuck into the nitty gritty.

"Don't sweat the details" is a popular idiom, but I think it is actually poor advice sometimes. Certainly the small details have to follow the big details, but they do need to follow and they do need to be thought through very carefully. I'm thinking here specifically of user experience and UI design which is everything online and should never be an afterthought. If you have been around the web for a while you'll be able to recall at least one train wreck of a website which on paper probably sounded good to the c-level execs but which failed in practice because no one involved in the execution had the savvy and/or the ownership to work through those tedious details which make a site really work well.

I can think of one classic example here in NZ and recently news broke of another, iYoumu.com, which has apparently decided to shut down after failing to generate enough interest. On the one hand it is a shame to see these guys not make it, on the other hand it was obvious at first glance that the site wasn't working. Billed as a social network for grownups I checked it out when they first launched, but never went back after logging in just once. IMHO the problem was a lack of attention to detail, and not only UI details...the details of what matters to me