The 10 Golden Principles for building successful web apps - Fred Wilson - #fowa
The 10 Golden Principles for building successful web apps.
by Fred Wilson (AVC)
1. Speed (is the most important feature)
— even more with mainstream users than power users
— use pingdom to monitor all their portfolio apps
— speed is directly related to user growth
2. Instant Utility
— service has to be useful right out of the box
3. Voice
— software is media (magazine, newspaper, tv-show)
— software has to have a personality
— people should feel they are consuming media when they consume your product
— fail whale as personality
4. Less is More
— over time you can grow the utility of your service
— at launch it must be very simple (delicious)
5. Programmable
— let others connect to, add value to your application
— read/write apis (if it’s not read/write it’s not an api)
— when people can add value to your application, they are adding energy (and users, and data) to your applications.
6. Personal
— Let users contribute their data and energy to your application
— Personal for everybody
7. RESTful
— Everything in the application has a clean, understandable url
— Allows the web at large to discover and access your application in deep ways
8. Discoverable
— SEO (understand SEO and its rules)
— Build from the ground up to be SEO friendly
— Build from the ground up to be Social Media discoverable
9. Clean
— application cannot be busy on the page
— white/dark space, lots of it.
— big fonts
— not too much functionality presented on any one page
— easy to understand what every thing does
10. Playful
— weight watchers is a game with game dynamics
— use this approach in your application
— status, badges, followers, media consumption
—-
Other comments:
— mobile, social, global, playful, intelligent
— product marketing: marketing has to be *in* the product
— product has to be a marketing vehicle for the product itself
— guerilla/street/stunt marketing: inexpensive, powerful, works
