Startups are popping up everywhere, but many won't survive. Why? Because they have no business model, or are completely dependent on Google AdSense (there's more that you think - make an effort to unblock Google ads from your vision next time you visit them). The freshview guys, creators of Campaign Monitor, a web app that helps companies like Apple, eBay, HP manage their email newsletter mailouts, have blogged about
how you can make your service worth paying for.
They make many very good points, but this is the one I like the most:
The web and software development community has a nasty habit of
looking in on itself and forgetting about the other 99% of the online
population. While everyone else out there is building for the early
adopter crowd and going to bed dreaming of getting TechCrunched, why not look outside this circle and try to solve a real problem that real people are having.
Too many people I speak to are focused on technology instead of a
solution. "It's gonna be really cool, we've got RSS feeds, a neat
tagging system and the whole thing runs on 3 lines of Rails code". Now
take a deep breath, and realise that none of that means a thing to your
customers. They want to leave work 5 minutes early, they want it to
take 2 steps instead of 5. They don't want a tag cloud.
Spot on.
P.S. A random thought just crossed my mind - when your iPod dies (i.e. comes up with a sad face), why doesn''t Apple tell you the 5 Rs on that screen or at least give you a link to it, instead of requiring you to go call Apple support, or search their website?