Friday: Building Community Driven Apps

By Dan Benjamin

• Start something
  • Rails is ideal platform for web 2.0
    • fast prototyping
    • no wasted work, prototype becomes product

Cork’d

• 500 users in first 2 or 3 hours
• 20,000 in first month
• cork’d was just acquired

The steps

• Make a plan
  • good idea != successful, make a plan
• Start small
  • showed his mac mini in a cabinet, they started with that
• Stay agile: resist big infrastructure
  • focus on the app, not on the hosting
• Build the right team
  • keep it small and don’t invite everyone to help
• Determine ownership
  • Don’t just do 50/50
• Have a revenue stream (ad’s don’t count)
  • think of your app like a business
• Focus on simplicity
  • pictures of ipod
  • don’t build 50 features, instead, build 10 features; then people can only say that it doesn’t do something, not that it sucks at something
• Don’t release a public beta
  • cork’d came out as a 1.0 beta
  • did a private beta of just friends
• Know your audience
  • they learned a ton from the private betas
  • even better than knowing is actually being your audience
• Build the app: The days of only being a programmer and not being a designer are gone, you have to do some of both
  • Think like a designer
  • Consider the data
    • Avoid big migrations
    • user entered data == bad!
    • “you’d be suprised how many different ways users spell california”
    • normalized data == good
  • Collaborate
    • common rails collaberation tools (svn, capistrano, campfire, basecamp, lighthouse)
    • collaborate in real time
    • they (dan benjamin and dan cederholm) met face to face in the airport when someone wanted to acquire them
    • use plugins (ym4r geocode, open_id_authentication, exception_notification, tagging, attachment_fu)
  • Take “Code Vacations”
• Get noticed
  • “It’s google’s world, we just live in it.” – Quannon Au
  • use smart urls (increase usability and help googe)
  • leverage your markup (meta description, google does actually use meta tags, they like sentance descriptions, commas, capitalization, etc.)
• Recruit Members – make it obvious and really easy to signup
  • Ask only what’s truly necessary
    • who get’s it right (cork’d, twitter, stikkit)
    • ask for everything but only require what is necessary
  • Limit non-members
    • youtube shows user links when you’re not signed in
    • show users what they could do but don’t let them until they create an account
  • Keep them coming back for more
    • make frequent improvements, not massive version changes
    • respond positively to your members
• Create a developer network
  • Share your api
• Find good parters
• Just ship it

“If you do things right, people won’t know you’ve done anything at all.” -Futurama

This was a great, practical session. Nothing earth shattering but good reminders and a few great tips.