Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, posted a nice piece: Stealth Start-Ups Suck.

He actually has a lot of bright things to say in this so-called rant.

My rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service.

I would say that might be a little bit tight, but it is definetly in the ballpark. The heavy hitting on FeedLounge started in April, and we launched the Alpha in June, so we are good there.

Why go fast? Many reasons:
[1]- First mover advantage is important.
[2]- There is no such thing as a unique idea. I guarantee that someone else has already thought of your wonderful web service, and is probably way ahead of you. Get over yourself.
[3]- It forces you to focus on the key functionality of the site.
[4]- Being perfect at launch is an impossible (and unnecessary and even probably detrimental) goal, so don’t bother trying to achieve it. Ship early, ship often.
[5]- The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you’ll start getting feedback from users.

1. Important when you can get it, however, in the end, its the users that choose the leader. If a competitor can come in head and shoulders above the leader in functionality, it’s often possible to unseat the first mover.
2. Agreed. What we are doing is not unique in its various bits and pieces, in fact it’s the combinations of non-unique ideas in interesting ways that help make FeedLounge compelling to the user. Without a great user experience, there is no permanent user (and that’s no unique idea, just often forgotten in the ‘next rev’ mentality).
3. Absolutely. Our focus ended up being sharp enough to kill some really cool stuff before we launched. Do we wish we launched with it? Yes. Are we sad for launching when we did? No. Are our alpha users jumping up and down about how kick-ass we are? You bet.
4. Sure, early and often works in open source, there is no reason it wouldn’t work here. With only one deployment, your service should be updated regularly.
5. This is the key point people! If you sit back in a vacuum for a year, you are not getting the feedback that makes the service great. You might think it is absolutely the coolest thing, but if you are out that long, when you come into the light, people will be saying ‘What the hell is that???’ Knowing what features our users want in the service by direct communication right from the start? PRICELESS.

The success of a web service is inversely proportional to the secrecy that surrounded its development.

I don’t think this is necessarily true. I think most people that are keeping something secret are also paranoid and just straight-up crazy. Crazy almost always leads to the lack of success.

Web services have many advantages over shipping software. You can continuously update the service, fix bugs and add new features. There are no long development cycles. Embracing this is a key to success. The first version (or several versions, probably) of any service you create is most likely going to suck. And that’s ok. Your service won’t scale to handle a lot of traffic. It will be missing a huge amount of functionality.

Web services have their adavantages and disadvantages. I think that growth and feedback are great things, but you don’t need to open the kimono before you are ready. Having hundreds of users say ‘where is feature x?’, where feature x is the basic idea behind your service, is not useful feedback. It frustrates the users because a baseline doesn’t exist, and you are frustrated because you ARE working on it. There is also no need to invite a million users over, have the flash crowd toast your server, then say to yourself “Hey, this thing doesn’t scale to a million users”. You already knew this, and all it does is hurt your perception in the marketplace, IMHO. FeedLounge is in alpha testing now to work out major bugs (Hey, this is broken!), get user feedback (What the fsck were you thinking here?), and make sure that we can fix the scaling bottlenecks as we open the valve. We are growing by community feedback in a few quick, large steps, not one giant leap.

A passionate user is one of your greatest assets. And I would argue that the only thing of real value a web service has is its users. They act as advertising for you, telling all their friends about your service. They are the best source of new feature ideas. And they are the best Q.A. testers you can get.

Agree, agree, agree and agree. Couldn’t have said it better. I couldn’t have asked for better alpha testers, and the amazingly large response for beta signups has blown apart my expectations. It is very apparent from our user comments that the world is ready for another web based feed reader, and we are positioned to deliver. Are you watching?

Great post Mark, and keep more like that coming!

Update: Russell Beattie added to the topic, defending 24HourLaundry:

The thing that annoys me most about the comments on 24H Laundry is this ass-backwards sentiment about how there are no unique ideas left out there.

Mark said that there are no unique ideas, and I agreed with him. Depends on your definition of unique, and how far it has to go. If it is just an idea, there are no unique ideas. There may be unique implementations, but I firmly believe that someone out there has thought of it before. They just may have not done something about it.
And I was not and will not jump on the 24HourLaundry sucks bandwagon. People do what they do because they think they are doing the best thing at the time. I can respect someone else’s decision to do that, but that is definetly not the way I would take it. Then again, I am not as popular as Marc Andreesen.

Update: Ross Mayfield posted this little gem:

- Part of the rationale for stealth is competition. But there are more leaks than plumbers, and getting ahead of your competitors matters less than getting in bed with your users.
- Part of the rationale for stealth is stardom. When media was broadcast, you countered lack of access with exclusivity. Now you need to be inclusive from the get go.

Just make sure when you invite your users to bed that there is a bed to sleep in. Inclusive from the get go, yes. Talking blue sky because you don’t have anything, no.

Popularity: 23%

WIth all the rumors about Google starting an online payment service, I wanted to share my simple idea of a payment service that would become ubiquitous on the web. While I fully expect something from Google to be simpler to use than Paypal, and scale much larger, I would love to see Google take on micropayments.

The basic idea is to support micropayments between millions/billions of buyers and sellers. To acheive this, payment processing would need to be revolutionized:

Simple identity

Using something simple like sxip or similar, so that login and other high costs parts of the transaction go away from a user interaction perspective.

Front $1 to every user of the system

Or, alternately, have the user put the money into their accounts in larger chunks ($10-$20 or more). This will be the first key to a massive micropayment system, acting as a clearinghouse until the bill amount reaches an amount that the transaction can be passed to normal payment processors (PayPal, Visa, banks, etc). If a company like Google fronted $1 to each user of the system, that amounts to a maximum of $6 billion global maximum, they should be able to cover that.

Reduce the cost of a transaction

Confirm and process the requests in realtime, with no transaction log. A transaction log of billions per day would be a cost to great to bear for the system to work. Figure out what the system cost of one transaction (debit to one user, credit to another) is, set some cost per transaction, and let the system run. Invidiual vendors would be able to charge whatever they wanted, and could batch up transactions until they meet some minimum that represents profit to them.

Fraud prevention

Since you are not logging transactions, some sort of fraud tracking/prevention program will have to come into place. Google could use their IP in ‘click fraud’ here as well, or you could push some of the liability to the vendor of the transaction, and allow them to choose to log the transaction or merely refund any fraud requests.

If Google actually does something like this, I believe it will be the biggest impact to the current web that they have acheived to date.

Update: Charlene has some comments in the same vein, as well as David.

Popularity: 24%

Looking at a few if/elif/elif statements in my code, I thought I should use a switch statement instead. Who knew Python didn’t have one? I didn’t until this morning.

I found a post by Simon Willison on the subject, good stuff.

I will probably go with a dictionary here, as most of my ’switches’ are known prior to runtime.

Popularity: 23%

Tired of carrying my Windows desktop to Windows-only consulting gigs, I broke down and bought a Dell Inspiron 9300, and as soon as it arrived, upgraded it to 2GB of RAM. This is my first laptop with 2GB, the Powerbook 17 having 1.5 and about 4 others had 1GB. Note: I am selling the 2 256MB DIMMs on ebay now starting at $5, if anyone is interested.

I choose the 1900×1200 screen because I am a sucker for real estate, and although the 9300 has the grace of a boat anchor, it will do the job well running a database, app server, and application all at the same time. I won’t miss the 20″ LCD that my desktop has with a screen like this, either. This reduces my need to have putty be a tabbed-terminal application, although I would pay for something that did that.

I guess I need to get another laptop stand to put on the left side of my desktop display, so I will have a 17, 20, 17 layout, using Synergy to go between them. And if I can wrangle the Honeywell keyboard back from Jason, I should be one happy camper.

The Powerbook will still be my primary machine for mail, app development, etc, as the user experience is hard to beat. Mail.app may not be the best mail client, but its spam filtering works.

I might need to consider just upgrading the desktop to Windows Server 2003, so it can host a shared copy of SQL Server for all the other machines.

Popularity: 22%