The FriendFeed Distribution Miss
From Bret Taylor: He saved OpenAI, invented the Like button, and built Google Maps • Expert
You're running a follower-based social network (similar to Twitter) with 12 employees - 11 of whom are exceptional engineers. Your team includes the people who built Google Maps and the first Gmail engineers. You've invented the like button and real-time newsfeed - innovations that will later become foundational to social media.
Your product is objectively superior to your main competitor (Twitter):
- More features and faster innovation
- 100% uptime vs. Twitter's frequent outages (the 'fail whale')
- Better product polish
- Strong popularity in certain markets (Turkey, Italy, Silicon Valley)
However, one summer changes everything: Obama, Ashton Kutcher, and Oprah Winfrey all join Twitter. Your growth immediately stalls.
Your team is extremely product-focused - you came from Google where distribution was never a problem due to AdWords and Google's existing reach. You're confident that superior product quality and reliability will win, especially since Twitter is down half the time and users are frustrated.
But you're losing market share rapidly despite having what most users agree is a better product.
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Get feedback on your approach and see how others solved it.
Continue with Google"I'd make the product better by adding more features and improving the UI. Maybe do some marketing too."
"The core problem is differentiation, not features. I'd start by identifying what job customers are hiring this for that we could do 10x better..."