My thoughts for yesterday's BarCamp

[wxia...@gmail.com]

I attended yesterday's BarCamp Shanghai. Lot's of US companies and entrepreneurs showed up. One company and entrepreneur's presentation stood out. That company is UserVoice, the founder is Marcus. UserVoice is a software and web site to help business to collect customer's feedback, like Salesforce.com Idea. The founder made a very interesting presentation, which I attended late but I have asked him to share his slides. He and his other 3 co-founders moved to his house, they all sold their cars except one car, his wife buy food from cheap market and save money. They spent first 2 months to develop first version of product. Marcus told me he become friend of industry analyst online and get good review of his product. Now many big companies are using their product and pay $2400 per year.

The key lesson I learned: Be very fast to build a first version of product with a small set of features and release to market early. Cotweet's single biggest feature is to allow multiple people to manage tweet. They just start this year and they already have big share in Corporate twitters. UserVoice is not the only vendor of online user feedback tool, there are a lot of companies out there already, like salesforce.com, getsatisfaction... but they still can stand out, and make money. They had only 4 people in the first year and now they add two more.

I believe we need to move faster. I agree we need to narrow down the feature set so we could finish it the first version in 3 months. We are not full time yet, but we need to have small prototype first to validate and build confidence. So we could move to next stage, get some key customers, funding and full time employees.

Let's have a talk, look again at our feature set, development approach and schedule...Is everybody available today (Monday) night?

Wei

[Quiz]

A discussion inside SAP about the future of Biz software,
can you access this link?
https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p63365238/