So I built a webapp. OK, now what?

3 pointsby dvdt16년 전2 comments

A few buddies and I spent this summer building Facebook apps. Some of them (in my inevitably biased opinion) are pretty fun.

One Facebook App we made lets people overlay mustaches onto their friends' profile pictures.

Another Facebook app is for compositing your profile picture into The Daily Show's Rally to Restore Sanity poster. It shares similarities with Twibbon.

We thought both of them had a really good chance of becoming viral; yet neither seem to be. I'm at a loss as to why. Is the original concept bad? Did we fail in the execution? Do people just not use Facebook apps anymore? Is "virality" more stochastic than I originally anticipated?

More generally, how do you measure the odds of a product gaining lots of traction and users before you actually build it? I'm sure we all get caught up in our enthusiasm for the projects we are working on; what methods do you use to independently validate your ideas?

I apologize for the two differing ideas in this post. 1) If possible, I'd love some feedback on how to make the apps I built better. 2) How about an open discussion on how to validate the worth of your ideas and projects?

Links to apps:

-Mustaching app: http://apps.facebook.com/youneedamustache

-Rally to Restore Sanity in your profile picture: http://apps.facebook.com/restoresanity

2 comments

nithyad16년 전

IMHO, the FB app fever among users has considerably died down and also, FB as a platform itself has over time limited an app's ability to become viral. So it's not necessarily the idea. It's the timing of the launch. For all that, a year or 2 back your app could have been a great success. So don't bother too much about your ability to evaluate an idea. It's all about riding on the next big trend.

mgkimsal16년 전

The cynic in me would suggest that you didn't get the right influencers to sneeze this to their groups. In think there's some Seth Godin in there someplace too.