I’m continuing my investigations into the laws of asymmetric competition. See our recent entries on the open API strategy of Facebook, and our article on ‘relinquishing control’ citing Flickr.
This example features a discussion of why Twitter made it big time, after languishing for a certain amount of time as a smaller niche application.
The key to their success, argues this commentary, is no that they added features, but that they added ‘onramps’ i.e. more ways to get there. This is of course what also made Amazon such a success at the beginning, when they understood that their store could be located on any other homepage.
I’m excerpting only part of this entry, which I recommend to read in full.
Case study:
“Instead, they followed a THIRD option: they built more onramps.
They added Jabber integration for sending/receiving messages, and added sending messages to the web interface. They also allowed you to keep track of just your friends in the web interface. They also released an API, allowing for others to build many more onramps.
As time has gone along, they’ve continued to build onramps before features. In fact, their lack of features has probably helped rather than hindered their growth. It’s as simple a concept for new users today as it was a year ago: tell your friends what you are doing. And, in fact, they could keep it that way, allowing for more and more development on their API. People could even build businesses around Twitter, strengthening it’s position as a powerful platform…
This is an important step.
Thinking about it in the way of ‘On Ramps’ could lead you to asking these types of questions:
1. Is there another web app that we can integrate with? [We’ve found that partnerships can be uber powerful in the early stages. Think about Plaxo’s Address Book widget. I’ve seen this used by many new startups.]
2. How does my app interact with various interfaces? How simple would it be to have it work in more? What would the minimal functionality be while still being useful? [If you are a time tracking app, could you build SMS integration?]
3. How simple have I made life for those using my API?
Conclusion: Building more ways for your customers to access your app is better than building more things to do in your app…especially early on. If you want to increase adoption the right way, make accessing your app as easy as possible.”