I’ve been meaning to start a blog for a while, but now that I’m going back to work at Google, I feel like the daily commuting time might actually keep me writing. So, without further ado, welcome to my first post: Why Posterous? I figure it’s appropriate to start with a topic as meta as this. Also, on the heels of selling Aardvark to Google, Posterous provides a good opening to talk about one of the things that I think made Vark successful.
The Internet is a place where network effects dominate. Whether a business is algorithm based (e.g., Google), or content based (e.g., Youtube), or activity based (e.g., Facebook), or commerce based (e.g., eBay) – more visitors means a higher quality experience. That means the site that has a traffic lead tends to build on that lead. Once a powerful incumbent exists, a new entrant has to be much better along some critical dimension to change people’s habits.
In the past, I tended to think that many opportunities existed to create new websites in categories where no incumbent existed if one picked carefully and executed well. But when the time came to actually start a new Internet business in 2007, I concluded that the web itself had become saturated. Excluding the most fanatical digerati, people do not visit more than a half dozen distinct websites on a regular basis. In the last five years, I can only count one website that has entered my normal rotation (Facebook). Youtube rotated in but rotated back out, as have many other sites. Twitter is on the verge of earning itself a spot. So it seemed foolhardy to think that I might build a new destination site. Instead, my cofounders and I decided to build something that could be accessed from the places where people already spend their time online. The idea was that we should add value to people’s existing habits not try to change them.
Aardvark was the sixth idea that we tried, following a string of failed prototypes (see my comment below). But all our ideas were subject to the restriction that they could not be a destination site. Any candidate idea had to be useful from within some other online application. Aardvark is designed to be a contact that is accessible from anywhere that contacts go (email, phone, IM…). It wasn’t until we were about eighteen months into the company that we finally built a full-fledged website. That seemed pretty remarkable for a *web* company but I think it will increasingly be there norm.
Companies that build their business on the back of SEO, or on iPhone, or as a Facebook application are all part of what I see as a new world order on the web. If you can get people on masse to type the name of your site into their browser bar, you will probably be worth billions but you need to be a braver entrepreneur than I to chase that prize. But you’ll start to see more and more companies like Zynga build enormous value in symbiosis rather than competition with the major online brands.
So, in choosing a blogging platform, it just made sense to use Posterous. The whole idea of the site is that I never have to go the website and can push content from any major web application to be accessed on all the major third party applications. That means I can blog when I don’t have convenient access to the Internet (like from a shuttle bus) and I can support fellow entrepreneurs who are moving to build value on the shoulders of the big sites in this new era of open and semi-open platforms.