Starting a Social App? Find a niche and work outward
In the early stages of starting a social web app, startups often wonder what group of people would make for good early adopters. What group should we focus our development and marketing efforts on?
It’s a tough question, and just having it means that the application probably isn’t as focused as it could be. For the most focused apps this question isn’t an issue.
Successful apps, however, tend to be like stories, about a very particular subject that can be generalized. They often start off in a niche, succeed there and then grow outward.
There are many examples of this. Here are a few:
Flickr -> gaming (the community that was Game Neverending)
Amazon -> Book lovers
Basecamp -> web designers (people who followed 37signals)
Twitter -> Web designers (that’s the only group I hear talking about it)
eBay -> Collectors
MySpace -> Musicians/musicphiles
Facebook -> College students (Harvard)
Corkd -> web designers (who drink wine)
BlinkSale -> web designers
All of these applications started serving a particular niche and then grew outward to a more mainstream audience. (except for maybe Twitter and Corkd, which are still super young but seem to be serving their niche well)
Yet some applications, like Netflix, stay in a niche.
As the shakedown and advertisation of the huge social networks continues, I think we’ll see a migration away from the networking-only services to services where social features are being added on top of existing functionality (so it’s not the only functionality). Most likely these services will already be serving a niche, and the addition of social features will be a way they can break out of that if it makes sense to.
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Comments
1. Darren Ramowski 4:14pm, Thu 1st, 2007
Hi, great article and I couldn’t agree more especially with final point.
For a hobby I wrote an online application a few years ago which was targeted at a niche market. Without any marketing the site grow steadily mainly by word of mouth and resulted in me gradually introducing new features based on the user bases requirement. Over time the site organically grow into a more social site allowing users to interact, view users information and everything you expect from social sites these days. Over the last 12 months, again without advertising, I have now started to see a massive growth in new users. It’s human nature, people want to be social.
2. heri 8:48pm, Mon 5th, 2007
this post is so true, but i also think a web publisher needs also to be part of the niche he is targeting. i dont know if it is the case for myspace or amazon, but i know 37Signals and corkd were web designers, facebook was started by a harvard student. my rule here is : you have to use your app. dont try to design a website that would target people you have no idea how they live, work or play
3. Andrew Daum 2:36pm, Wed 17th, 2007
I don’t know if I would call Netflix a social app
I agree with what you are saying though. It was really only a matter of time before the web became just a huge “voyeur” social application where people could interact with each other.
Oh yea… I like the cool ajax Preview as I am typing. Have to get this myself.