Julien Sharp - Design and Launch an Online Social Networking Business in a Week

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Table of Contents

Other Titles in the Click Start Series

Design and Launch an Online Boutique Business in a Week

Design and Launch an Online E-Commerce Business in a Week

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Acknowledgments

I am amazed at how easy it was to contact people while conducting the research for this book. Online networking certainly has made contacting people easier than ever before: a single writer can look up and contact the CEO of a large company (er... several CEOs, actually) on the internet, and get a kind response!

Most important, I would like to thank those experts in the field who have been more than generous in sharing their experience and insight:

Stuart Agtsteribbe, Scott Allen, Heather Armstrong, Larry Benet, Gina Bianchini, Peter Bihr, Karen Billipp, Paul Burani, Jere Calmes, Jim Crabbe, Bob Crull, Judy Gitenstein, Heather Graham, Alexander Gutin, Marilyn Jenett, Thad Martin, Elliott Masie, Ross Mayfield, Dr. Ivan Misner, Nikhil Nilakantan, Myra Norton, Jeremiah Owyang, Ted Rheingold, Ron Rubin, Pam Spaulding, Tracy Sullivan, Ray Thompson, Courtney Thurman, Rebekah Tsadik, Kaiser Wahab, Michael Walsh, and Robin Wolaner.

Big kudos also go to my very supportive partner in life, Alix MacLean, who gets a gold star for bringing me all those take-outsnot to mention many iced coffees from Joes in NYCwhile I typed furiously late into the evening.

I would like to say a special thanks to my office dog Verdell, who put up with months of very truncated walks and submitted to posing for many pictures as I was building my tester online network.

Finally, this book is for my goddaughter Molly Fant and my nieces and nephews Sydney, Jacob, and Grant Beechboard and Sofia Cerasoli, who have never known a time without a home computer, and for whom online networking will be as natural as breathing.

Foreword

by Ted Rheingold, Founder of Dogster.com and Catster.com

In June 2003 I got this funny idea: I thought, since people like sharing and showing off photos of their dogs, why not make a web service so they could show off their dogs online? I realized that although the internet offered most things, there was still no site dedicated to peoples dogs. I lied to myself and thought I could crank out a site in a couple of days and would start making money off it soon after that. It took more than a couple days, but it was still the fastest company Ive ever built.

Within three months of launching Dogster.com, 30,000 people had made web pages for their dogs, and I was bringing on my first advertisers. I wasnt able to quit my day job for another year, but the pleasure people received from being able to dedicate a page to their dogs and see everyone elses dog led to TV interviews, nationwide newspaper articles, invitations to speak at conferences, and more customers than one person could possibly interact with.

Fast-forward five years and it confounds me how much easier it would be to start such a site today. The digital landscape is awash with amazing and sophisticated tools for building an online networking business. Many require no technical knowledge and have easy hooks for making revenue. And if youre ready to get your hands dirty, you can build almost anything in fewer lines of code than has ever been possible. There are even free or cheap services to help with customer service, software and widgets, video and photo storage ... you name it.

But be forewarned: The one thing youll likely never be able to outsource and that will determine the success of your endeavor more than anything is developing, nurturing, and growing your user base from day one. Without happy, involved, engaged customers your beautiful, technically complete social networking service will be an empty city.

Thus, in the end, your goal has to be building a thriving, vibrant community, and a community platform is simply the exoskeleton youll need so you can really start your business.

When I started Dogster.com, I did not set out to build a social service. I did not expect that people would want social networking functionality (not that that was even a term at the time). But what made the difference, I believe, is that I listened to the early site visitors as closely as possible. Within a month, I knew I had to throw out the road map I had envisioned before the site was launched and should focus all my energies on doing everything I could to meet the needs of the customers that were already here.

One of the biggest benefits of offering a customer-focused product on the web is that youll have no shortage of opportunities to hear from them. Consider it free market research; and free QA, copyediting, and product planning. Even the biggest insult or complaint can be reversed to become a statement about how you can improve things to make your customers happier. And when you have happy customers, they tell everyone they know and then, suddenly, you have an army of free marketers and PR people telling your story for you.

So while social networking tools, services, and software have become commodities, something to be bought, sold, or traded, the thriving, growing community of customers is the rare thing that will be the true determinant of your businesss value. Thus, while its easy early on to believe the most important place to focus your attention is on building the right set of features, where your attention should always be is on getting your site in front of prospective customers.

Your chief concerns should be: How can I find out what they like and dont like? How can I get my first 10,000 registrants, so I can know if I can get it to 100,000, 1,000,000, or more? The business of your business then will be bringing those people together and making sure they have an ideal time every time they visit the site.

However, while it is very important to make the interaction between visitor and web service as pleasing as possible, the most important thing is to make interaction and networking among the visitors themselves as efficient and pleasurable as possiblethat is your business.

I once got some very good advice, which I literally used to decide whether to start Dogster in the first place. The advice was: Right now is the right time to be starting on the next big thing. This evergreen truism will never be false. So you havent missed the boat, nor has the opportunity passed you by. When you think you have the perfect plan, go for it.

Ted Rheingold
Founder, Dogster.com and Catster.com
June 2008

Preface

There has never been a better time to be an internet entrepreneur! Thanks to Moores Law, technology is progressing at lightning speeds, costs of online storage and bandwidth are decreasing at the same rate, and we now have a generation of consumers who have never known a time without computers and the internet.

MOORES LAW

This concept was developed and explained by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in a paper he wrote in 1965. He stated that the number of transistors on a chip, or the amount of data, etc. a computer chip can hold, will double about every two years. At the same time, the price for such chips will decrease. This concept is easily understood when considering the newest mp3 players and microcomputers, and even the newest smart phones with their staggering capabilities.

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