Genius! I have 2 kids and spent the last 3 weeks fretting about camps and getting kids into camps. Its all word of mouth at the moment. Brilliant idea!
We just launched Dabble, our app and website last week. We would like to hear thoughts & impressions from you folks. We're a team of 7 engineers working from SF and Buenos Aires.
We wanted an app that could give us a sense of a place and those that came before us. We launched last week at DEMO. Here is the 6-min DEMO pitch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5efdZfLEYI
This is an awesome post. Thank you for this. Thinking about a start-up as an experiment, not a business, until it succeeds is the biggest takeaway.
That said, there is some truth to the fact that you need to love it before you can let others see it. It has to be clear to you why you yourself want to use it. We have gone out on many launches. Alpha, Beta, and now launching to the world on 17th April.
None of those early launches stuck! Why? Because it was still a Work-In-Progress. And it felt that way to our early users. It felt like we had to make excuses when presenting the product to friends and early adopters.
Their launches are not beating customer expectations as they once used to - think iPhone 1, iPod, Nano, Air and compare that to today's launch of the iPad. Was that launch revolutionary, or modest?
This point alone doesn't mean that they are not a bet worth taking. But that, taken along with the fact that they're now facing tougher odds growing 20% or 30% per annum on already massive sales figures makes it harder to justify investing in them in order to make huge returns. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/business/apple-confronts-t...)
Lastly, and most importantly, society, especially a free one, always finds a way to mobilize against those that are deemed too powerful. The simple argument here is that in order to scale past the law of large numbers and continue to deliver "predictable" growth to the Street, companies sometimes have to push against the limits of acceptable business practices. We have seen that with Walmart, Microsoft, Exxon, BP, AT&T not to mention the robber barons of old.
Free societies, especially representative democracies check such growth with regulation (sometimes necessary, sometimes far reaching, but in its ideal - self-correcting). The same sorts of regulations that prevented AT&T (of old think Ma Bell) and Microsoft from extending its reach, will soon affect Apple. One can argue, it already has. What with lax supervision of its subcontractors in China etc (Foxconn)
That said, I am very impressed with how quickly Apple responded to these accusations, and tended to being more open than closed. An instinct not easily attributed to Apple.
In closing. Apple is probably a safe place to park your cash to hedge inflation. Perhaps even enjoy 4-5% YoY growth averaged aver 10 years. But blockbuster, maybe not.
If what you built is a consumer product, and accessible to friends and family - then you know you need to move on when friends after being coaxed into using your product still don't give a damn.