When you create a product that people love, you take on a special kind of responsibility. This is what happens when you don’t take that responsibility seriously:
Mixin was a very cool little tool. Lots of people loved it. And now it’s dead, because its parents didn’t ensure that they gave their little product-baby what it needed to survive.
What a product needs to survive, of course, is cash. And that has to be baked in from the very start; the product-baby must be trained from infancy, as it were. A product’s gotta have what it takes to convince people to turn over their hard-earned money… or it’s going to end badly.
Twinkles in your eye aren’t enough. Coolness & popularity aren’t hard currency — outside of high school. Even being loved isn’t enough.
All those who loved Mixin are now left out in the cold.
RIP Mixin. Sorry you weren’t given a fair shake at life.
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Hey Amy!
It’s funny because I just wrote about this in my newsletter this month. I don’t think people starting projects based on hope and excitement realize how crucial it is to make sure their product or service meets a true AND desperate need.
If you want people to pull money out of their pocket, you better have a dang good reason.
Tell that to twitter.
You mean a “business” founded by a guy who’d been in the industry for 15 years, previously successfully sold a startup (that could have been a profitable business), had mega connections, and millions? Oh yes. Everybody making some little toy is doing the same thing as Ev.
So if he didn’t have those advantages then twitter would have failed?
Almost undoubtedly.
You probably forget (or weren’t aware) that Twitter also rode the rising wave of a brand new sensational technology – Rails. Rails is how almost all of the early adopters found out about it, that or by being in the silicon valley crowd.
This was an awesome post Amy! You need to tell that to Yahoo when they bought delicious.