Deviant Abstraction

Don Dodge has been given seven rules through which Kleiner Perkins (the VC company behind Google, Amazon, Netscape and so on) invest or not in a start-up.

(source: roland from Flickr)

• Instant Value to customers - solve a problem or create value with the first use
• Viral adoption - Pull, not push. No direct sales force required
• Minimum IT footprint, preferably none. Hosted SaaS is best.
• Simple, intuitive user experience - no training required.
• Personalized user experience - customizable.
• Easy configuration based on application or usage templates.
• Context aware - adjust to location, groups, preferences, devices, etc.

My few comments:

• It shows how much the business landscape has changed. As others have put it, no one is anymore listening to sales pitch. In the Internet age, most deals are initiated by customers and not by sales guys. Other deals are handled directly at executive levels. Making needs emerge from an interaction with a sales guy is out of the norm nowadays. Internet and new media own this role. Of course, doing so allow easy scale up for a start up.
• The KP second rule about minimal IT footprint seems obvious. You want to build a product. You need to lower as much as possible any obstacle to adoption. KP want company serving markets. Not projects based ones.
• It is also interesting to see how automated adaptation is the norm now for every product: you expect the product to be easily customizable to your need. Whether adding new levels on a videogame or a functionnality in a software, it should be easily doable. If the software is doing it by itself then even better. For instance, Chandler is trying to add it as seen here or here. There is still of values in customization and integration but only if it is automated. Customers want to be empowered. As Bruce Sterling puts it we are moving away from a “systemic” economy to a “spimes” one
• Value lies in community and mass adoption. As we have already seen, customers want to be empowered. They want to be able to manage on their own the product and have it customized to their needs. This fact opens space for mass products which are automatically tailored to one’s needs. For instance, Google, Amazon,… Why do you think they all invest in data-mining?
• Those rules summarize what is hot right now. Not what will be hot next year (next month?).

Via Don Dodge’s Blog

Update Ben Barren is also blogging about this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 18th, 2006 at 12:08 am and is filed under marketing, software, web2.0, economy, products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.