Over the weekend I saw two tools that recently launched. One was widbook and the other was gawk.it. Widbook is social book authoring network. It lets you write books and share your drafts with fans and friends to get their comments. It also allows you to discover books on topics that you are interested in.
Gawk.it is a blog comment search engine. You can search comments that anyone wrote on anyone's blog and jump directly to that comment. Idea is to easily search old and new conversations and start engaging with the conversation.
Both services seem interesting on their own right. But when I tried both services, I got the impression that widbook launched a bit prematurely. It got coverage on Mashable as the YouTube of books. Landing page had a well designed Vimeo clip, yet I logged on to take a look around, the site was not living up to the expectation set by the clip. Right after logging on, it was not clear what I could do to see sample books and other people's activity.
Gawk.it was different. It had one search entry on its landing page. Although there was no overview video clip, it was clear what I needed to do. After searching for a few terms, I was sold on the idea of searching the comments. This will be a great tool for those people who want to promote their content through social collaboration.
Widbook may have grander vision of what they are going after. But in pursuit of the vision, widbook is not usable yet because it's missing social piece. Without social component, widbook will be competing with Microsoft Word. In other words, it's missing Minimum Viable Product for it to be a usable product. Even worse, it's difficult for new user to imagine how widbook will implement this social bit. It's not clear how social sharing offered by widbook will benefit authors.
Gawk.it is not fully baked either. It does not search all comments. Comments on this blog did not show up on gawk.it search results. But it is clear to see what problem gawk.it solves and how it solves it. Although it's not fully baked, it's usable with limited capability.
When launching a new product, always launch it as early as you can. But make sure that your product gives a good idea to users how it can make their lives better.
Gawk.it is a blog comment search engine. You can search comments that anyone wrote on anyone's blog and jump directly to that comment. Idea is to easily search old and new conversations and start engaging with the conversation.
Both services seem interesting on their own right. But when I tried both services, I got the impression that widbook launched a bit prematurely. It got coverage on Mashable as the YouTube of books. Landing page had a well designed Vimeo clip, yet I logged on to take a look around, the site was not living up to the expectation set by the clip. Right after logging on, it was not clear what I could do to see sample books and other people's activity.
Gawk.it was different. It had one search entry on its landing page. Although there was no overview video clip, it was clear what I needed to do. After searching for a few terms, I was sold on the idea of searching the comments. This will be a great tool for those people who want to promote their content through social collaboration.
Widbook may have grander vision of what they are going after. But in pursuit of the vision, widbook is not usable yet because it's missing social piece. Without social component, widbook will be competing with Microsoft Word. In other words, it's missing Minimum Viable Product for it to be a usable product. Even worse, it's difficult for new user to imagine how widbook will implement this social bit. It's not clear how social sharing offered by widbook will benefit authors.
Gawk.it is not fully baked either. It does not search all comments. Comments on this blog did not show up on gawk.it search results. But it is clear to see what problem gawk.it solves and how it solves it. Although it's not fully baked, it's usable with limited capability.
When launching a new product, always launch it as early as you can. But make sure that your product gives a good idea to users how it can make their lives better.
It's usually a good idea to launch as soon as possible, gain feedback, and figure out if an idea will be successful or not before you waste months of your time and money on an idea that isn't going to be successful. I think that startups generally face 3 big problems - coming up with a quality minimum viable product, finding customers, and settling on the right business model - and that launching early helps solve all 3 of those problems. No product is ever really finished, so you have to have some judgement about when a product is viable in the market and learn to trust your own instincts. Finding customers is really hard, but between search ads, social media, the wealth of options available at BuyFacebookFansReviews for example, and all of the other dozens of means of promoting yourself through content marketing and blogs, there's ways to go around getting customers through hard work even if you don't have the money for a PR agency. The last step is also quite hard because many startups want to give away everything for free and rely on selling ads to make money. This is a risky move for most companies and an easy way to kill your company if you're not making any money. Launching early is great in most circumstances IMO as long as you are smart about what you are producing and what your initial goals are.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely agree with launch as early as possible to search for product market fit.
DeleteChallenge is to launch with clear functional feature that can be useful in its current form. Best pitch is the working product, and product should do the pitch for you if it gets MVP right.
Hey thanks for the gawk.it mention and the thoughts/feedback. It's definitely a work in progress, and is going to take some time to get around to achieving the full mission of making all conversations searchable...but I'm working through it little by little (and very happy to hear the idea is clear and that people already get at least a little usefulness out of it).
ReplyDeleteAt the moment, I'm working mostly on integrating blogs and comments that use the Disqus commenting system...but I will be expanding other commenting systems (like yours here on futureofsocialnetwork.com) asap...so hopefully you'll stay tuned! ;-)
Kevin, thank you for your comment. Kudos to simple and effective UX and recognizing the problem. Will look forward to seeing future enhancements.
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