The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [15]
Brilliant Strategy
We decided to enter the instant messaging (IM) market. In 2004, that market had hundreds of millions of consumers actively participating worldwide. However, the majority of the customers who were using IM products were not paying for the privilege. Instead, large media and portal companies such as AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! operated their IM networks as a loss leader for other services while making modest amounts of money through advertising.
IM is an example of a market that involves strong network effects. Like most communication networks, IM is thought to follow Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network. This makes intuitive sense: the value to each participant is driven primarily by how many other people he or she can communicate with. Imagine a world in which you own the only telephone; it would have no value. Only when other people also have a telephone does it become valuable.
In 2004, the IM market was locked up by a handful of incumbents. The top three networks controlled more than 80 percent of the overall usage and were in the process of consolidating their gains in market share at the expense of a number of smaller players.2 The common wisdom was that it was more or less impossible to bring a new IM network to market without spending an extraordinary amount of money on marketing.
The reason for that wisdom is simple. Because of the power of network effects, IM products have high switching costs. To switch from one network to another, customers would have to convince their friends and colleagues to switch with them. This extra work for customers creates a barrier to entry in the IM market: with all consumers locked in to an incumbent’s product, there are no customers left with whom to establish a beachhead.
At IMVU we settled on a strategy of building a product that would combine the large mass appeal of traditional IM with the high revenue per customer of three-dimensional (3D) video games and virtual worlds. Because of the near impossibility of bringing a new IM network to market, we decided to build an IM add-on product that would interoperate with the existing networks. Thus, customers would be able to adopt the IMVU virtual goods and avatar communication technology without having to switch IM providers, learn a new user interface, and—most important—bring their friends with them.
In fact, we thought this last point was essential. For the add-on product to be useful, customers would have to use it with their existing friends. Every communication would come embedded with an invitation to join IMVU. Our product would be inherently viral, spreading throughout the existing IM networks like an epidemic. To achieve that viral growth, it was important that our add-on product support as many of the existing IM networks as possible and work on all kinds of computers.
Six Months to Launch
With this strategy in place, my cofounders and I began a period of intense work. As the chief technology officer, it was my responsibility, among other things, to write the software that would support IM interoperability across networks. My cofounders and I worked for months, putting in crazy hours struggling to get our first product released. We gave ourselves a hard deadline of six months—180 days—to launch the product and attract our first paying customers. It was a grueling schedule, but we were determined to launch on time.
The add-on product was so large and complex and had so many moving parts that we had to cut a lot of corners to get it done on time. I won’t mince words: the first version was terrible. We spent endless hours arguing about which bugs to fix and which we could live with, which features to cut and which to try to cram in. It was a wonderful and terrifying time: we were full of hope about the possibilities for success and full of fear about the consequences of shipping a bad product.
Personally, I was worried