Community Next Take-Aways: Slide.com and Meebo

Keith Rabois, VP Business Development, Slide.com

• Was involved with PayPal, Yelp, LinkedIn, and now Slide.com
• Common trait: original business model/idea was wrong
• Yelp: original idea was to spam friends with email on where to go to eat
• Try something, iterate until it works
• Start with value proposition, eventually people will find out about it
• YouTube, for example--didn't set out to be a video sharing site; people watched videos and cut and paste code into their email client (like Outlook); YouTube hit upon a consumer need (an easy way for people to keep in touch was to send something cool and interesting that they watched on YouTube)
• Most successful companies have an obsession with metrics--you won't be able to find out what's working until you have metrics
• Viral marketing is a way to hedge against strategy; if you don't know what your revenue model is, you have to acquire users cheaply; if your marginal cost of user acquisition (and user support) is $0.01, you should be able to generate more than $0.01 in revenue
• Only 3 successful types of Facebook apps: (1) intuitive judgment from recent college grads about product needs (e.g. free gifts), (2) widget makers (Rock You, Slide), (3) convert fully to focus on Facebook (iLike, Flixster)
• Yelp: paid reviewers in new cities to write reviews; only good if you can get the right people to do it, otherwise you don't inspire the right contributors later

Martin Green, VP Business Development, Meebo

• There is a difference between recruitment and retention
• Meebo focused on retention: delight and satisfy people who use the service
• Company mindset: wiki, forum, customer service--everyone in the company is on those
• Can't always predict what users want: most popular color was pink
• Who is the target user--get them in, show them mock-ups
• How do you get user feedback? Need to be them, or interview them all the time
• We have a short list of people we show stuff to. Tweak it until they say, "I would use that.
• Listen to how they describe things: "If you said it like this, I would use that."
• Get a 16-year-old to look at the product
• Like MySpace, does not emphasize Meebo marketing itself: "We want someone to send a message out inviting a friend to Meebo. We want this to happen through an actual person, not through our product."