One first such step is this experiment which appears at first to be complete nonsense. The first part of the experiment just involves creating that page which has 10 terms on it, and inventing a small page of content for each of those terms. Now we have to let that simmer for about a week and then I can return to the next phase.

Sorry that I can’t reveal the details, but if that was public then there might be some question about the validity of the results at the end.

Just for fun, if you figure out what I’m doing just from that page (which would be pretty impressive), you will receive cake. Everyone likes cake.

1. Product

I take this to be axiomatic.  There is absolutely no idea that is good enough that you can skimp on the implementation and expect to be around for very long.  The barriers to entry in software are so low that even if you are the first to market, if your product isn’t top-notch, you’ll get replaced.  I could write a huge article just on making products solid, but to sum it up here just realize that I’m referring to the application, the quality of support, all that good stuff that goes under the umbrella of “your offering”.

2. Promotion

A side effect of massive communication is that a fallacy appears which makes it seem like every good product will just sprout out of its shell and become instantly popular throughout the world.  Sadly, this isn’t even remotely true.  This effect comes from the fact that every great product that we see did become huge… we intrinsically don’t run into the products that didn’t get popular.  Further perpetuating this myth is that companies help it along (guilty!).  PR departments love telling the press about their organic growth.  While it may be true to some extent, companies are constantly trying to make it seem like their products grew despite their attempts to slow them down.  It’s a cute sentiment which drives even more traffic by making newcomers feel left-out if they don’t immediately jump on board – but it’s not what is really going on.

Even in the coveted scenario of exponential-growth, the flat part before the “knee” of the graph is long and painful (Seth Godin’s book, “The Dip” is a great guide to keeping steady and determined during that emotionally draining time).  Sam Walton once said of Walmart’s percieved overnight success: “Like most other overnight successes, it was about 20 years in the making.”

Many programmers tend to find this part of running a business distasteful.  You can see from the vitriol dolled out in the comments on Carsonified’s guest-post on TechCrunch about their Mattinator project that many (if not most) developers think of PR as almost a form of dishonesty.  However, if you want your product to reach its audience, you’re going to have to spread the word.  I doubt that it’s possible to accidentally overdo it and turn yourself into a spam firm like MySpace or media darlings like Apple.

The point I’m trying to make here is just that product isn’t enough no matter how good it is.  Sure you’ll probably grow a little just based on having a good product, but you need to grow fast enough to turn a profit before the money runs out.  You have to give this area of your business as much respect and attention as the other two primary sections.

3. Monetization

Another unfortunate surprise from the field is that monetization isn’t turn-key.  When I created LyricWiki, I figured that affiliate sales on music would be enough to easily cover hosting, especially if the site took off.  In a worse-case secenario, I could always slap some AdSense on there and make up the difference.  Boy, was I wrong!  Affiliate programs work well for sites where the user is already in the mood to buy – such as consumer-electronics review sites –  and just need a push to figure out which product to buy.  For everything else, they’re not very great.  I experienced the up-side of this with the book price-comparisons on CollegeInfoDesk, and the downside on LyricWiki.

As for advertising, this isnt’ the plug-and-play solution that it appears to be.  Sure, it only took me about 30 minutes to install AdSense, but that’s why AdSense pays so miserably (more on that in another post).  To make the math simple I’ll give you examples from when I was serving around 100,000 pages per day.  Of those 100,000 impressions Google decides that about 25% must be fraudulent and don’t count.  Even Google Analytics disagrees with Google’s AdSense traffic-counting.  After that, they pay a miserable pittance on the pages that docount.  So serving 100,000 pages per day was earning about $12.  Hosting costs were twice that. Thanks for nothing.

Finding the right ad networks for your site is a never-ending hassle.  The only easy alternative is inundating your site with ads.  You surely didn’t spend all of that time making a good product just so that you could give up 30% of the screen real-estate to annoying ringtone ads, so you have to suck it up just like you did with promotion and force yourself to put work towards this.  It may be hard to swallow since it seems like this isn’t actually improving your product, so think of it this way: the alternative to spending time on monetization is either having your product run out of money and disappear or be overwhelmed with cop-out advertising.  You really are making your product better by fighting over dimes here.

Unfortunately, you usually need to have a certain amount of traffic to get accepted to ad networks, but not always.  Here are a few networks I’ve had some luck with:

1. Text-link-ads for one-line ads.
2. TribalFusion (they have pop-unders enabled by default, so make sure to go into your settings and kill those).

That list was shorter than I expected, but I realized that my dealings with other networks never really met expectations. This was usually due to low payout and nothing related to customer-service except for with Google which drops the ball on both.

In the end, coming up with a clever way to monetize your app (such as Featuretisements or a freemium model) without banner-ads is the best route. You’ll be doing your customers a favor.

Conclusion

It’s probably strange to technologists to think that there are two other disciplines that will take up nearly as much time as the product itself, but in the end that’s what it takes to make turn a great product into a successful company.

I’m sure that claiming these are the three parts is controversial. Feel free to give me flack in the comments and recommend areas you think I forgot.

1. Give insights from my experiences so that you can learn from my mistakes which is faster and more economical than making them yourself!
2. Present primary research to figure out the real numbers behind some vague parts of the industry.
3. Inspire!

If you like those topics, then please subscribe to the RSS feed and hopefully I can help you in your pursuit for world domination.

My Background

In 2005, I founded Motive Force LLC while still a student at RIT majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Entrepreneurship. Motive Force runs several projects, the most visible of which is LyricWiki.org which serves upwards of 3 million pages per day. In addition to Motive Force I also work with another startup, mSpoke Inc. (creators of FeedHub) which has been a great ride as well. For more of the gritty details about me personally, see the About page on my personal site or follow me on FriendFeed.