Plenty more probably create valuable products that are hidden behind l33t interfaces and web pages that look like someone vomited up four different wordpress themes. Odds are these products are also going to die a slow death because the value they bring is too well hidden behind poor design choices. Arguing at the extremes provides no value here. In the vast middle there are probably products that could provide more value (and more revenue) with a bit of thought given to design and how the end-user will interact with the product.
Make a list of 10 absolutely fabulous web products that you love. Now draw a line through all of them that came to market as the first mover. I'll bet you don't draw a single line.
As long as businesses want more money and want to save more time, there is always room for b2b products that can demonstrate good ROI.
On the consumer side, there's certainly plenty of room. I just read that Meebo is reaching 30 million people per month. Twitter is functionally brand new and kicking ass.
The good news is that most consumer sites transition from a "providing value" stance (in the early days) to an "extracting value" stance (in the later days). Later stage consumer sites add more advertising, do more biz dev deals, and overall muddy up their value prop. Meanwhile, the next round of consumer startups leap into the fray with a nimble team, the next rev of web technologies, and a desire to provide value and build something that's better than the big guys. Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook... They are/were all on the same road.
Worked on a product for a while with basically the same value prop. User acquisition is tough when you're essentially competing with a vast array of topic-specific forums scattered across the Web. Many of these have very large existing user bases.
In the end, things didn't work out out. I think part of the reason is that people only care deeply about a small number of topics and they're willing to go where the community is.
Yep, it's so disappointing how many web projects provide solid value for many people, have a reasonable business model, but go to absolute shit and eventually fade to nothing chasing unsustainable returns. It's staggering how much better the web could be if the demand for exponential returns hadn't become so dominant on the business side.
This is the real answer right here. Any product that doesn't see rapid user growth already has one foot in the graveyard of Killed By Google.
That website is a showcase of amazing ideas that needed time and nurture to come to fruition, but were executed like a poor earning Mafioso having a bad week.
I feel like there’s a place for smaller, more niche products and that the pendulum is swinging back to it. A few million users only. No expectation of ever becoming a hundred billion business.
Something like Kagi, the old Dropbox, old Twitter. It’s never going to appeal to most people by design.
> if you are in a small business in a competitive market it could help.
Sure, it "could help". But let's say there are 2 identical sites. One site upgrades from DV to EV. The other site takes the same money and invests it in a Graphics Designer to make their home page look nicer.
Which one will sell more product? I'll put my money on the nicer-looking site every time.
This is what I meant further up thread when I mentioned segmenting the market. I don't believe everyone will move to a new solution but I do believe that some will. I also believe that the first users will be the technical ones who already understand the trade-offs and that there's a continuum of inconvenience that they'd be willing to endure (I'm lazy, so I won't tolerate much).
For example, think of the number of people who maintain their own static websites, either on GitHub or EC2 or elsewhere. All those people could just use Tumblr or Wordpress.com, yet they chose not to.
I would think that hundreds of years of engineering (mechanical and electrical) and solid products used all across the globe would be more valuable than a social website, but maybe I'm wrong.
I hate to seem cynical about this, it was an interesting article, but I can't help noticing that all the product examples were for a market of other web developers.
I doubt this is a sustainable market; surely, all web developers can't just sell to each other. The market for web development products can only be created and paid for by having a sustainable web product market for non web developers.
patio11's Bingo Cards feels a lot more 'real' to me as a product business, and I would be interested in hearing other examples done by small teams.
This is a structural feature of modern web entrepreneurship. Through a great new time-saving product with few annoyances at a low price, one builds an audience loyal enough that they can convince investors to hand them lots of money, and then fulfill whatever contractual obligation they've assumed to pound that userbase for more money/eyeballs, driving them away. Sometimes it's not even a matter of additional revenue, but stoking the ego of investors. Google, for example, just removed size from their image search in order to 'simplify the UI' for mobile users who are sexier in terms of plausible growth; This has driven away large numbers of power users, and made it manifestly less useful than Bing.
The average lifespan of a useful tool / company is only a few years; If investors are involved there is always a dark side. Userbase goodwill is a valuable resource will eventually be tapped and depleted.
The are wildly popular but they are in a niche yes. When they were not the Google we know today there were not many providing the same service or value, and potentially still isn't, so that is why they could get away with bland design. It was never bad design mind you.
Amazon is also king of providing value in their markets, and their markets are also apathetic toward flashy design. I don't need animations when I am provisioning an AWS instance nor when I am buying goods at the lowest possible price I can find.
However if I were not me, and I were shopping for luxury or boutique goods, a site that looked like Amazon would not instill me with confidence.
My point is just that the web has diverse design and UX needs and the current toolset caters for that. If someone managed to build a platform with those benefits and more and the webs market penetration then I would be on board.
I will argue still that it is necessary if you want an alternative to the web, as the alternative has to be a better value proposition for the end user not the developer.
I'm with you, but it's just part of the growing pains. The web is successful because it's easy to layer businesses on top of each other... I can have a Tumblr with a Shopify backend and Google Adwords on top. Apps are walled gardens so they can only enforce one business model at a time. That can make things nice and tidy, but it walls you out of the messy, compositional business models of the web.
Because business models are composed on the web, it's just harder to settle on unified design standards. It takes time for everyone to agree on a separation of responsibilities on the page. This is compounded by the sheer newness of the business models. My webcomic about fancy cheeses has a segment marketing a line of tractors now to industrial buyers at a conference in Wisconsin this week? OK. That's an opportunity I probably wouldn't have had selling Java apps.
The ones that have a lot of engineers have 50x more features today. Businesses and brands want a beautiful website with analytics and A/B testing out of the box, skinnable, changable via a CMS so that non technical designers can drag and drop in new components at will, and also get graphs of their efficacy. You have built in support chat systems to spend less on phone support. Your IT department to support, not develop, this site was 30+ with colo space in 2008 but now its like 3 dedicated ops people and the rest are devs.
OTOH, so many more business websites are built for a few hundred or thousand dollars by someone on upwork to host a bootstrap site with a shopify integration, and then you have an online store that would've been 10x the cost 5 years ago.
They rake in tons of money because many users care a lot less about the look and feel than they do about the service/content they provide.
But many is not all. If they were designed to be beautiful as well as functional, they might well see a bump in transactions.
The reason they don't is either deliberate branding (Drudge, I'd guess) or incompetence (eBay), or because it's not obvious the bump in traffic would be worth the expense and time (Amazon.)
And also history. When you've been around as a brand for a decade or more, you don't need shiny.
But it's really not a good plan for a startup to have an ugly site now unless it's making some kind of ironic retro point about itself.
"If you are a Web 2.0 company in today's Web you really need to ask yourselves, 'Are we solving a problem that everybody has or are we building a product for Robert Scoble?'"
Couldn't have said that better. There is a market for niche products online, to be sure. I think the problem is niche products pretending to be widely useful.
Of those products you name, GMail, Youtube, Chrome, Maps and Docs are near-commodity products. These are just basic services for which open-source versions exist, and every engineering team of about 50 people could easily recreate them given today's state of technology. This also holds for Facebook.
The real struggle lies not in the technology, but in the network-effect and branding.
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