In an effort to post more often I promise to keep my posts short and sweet. When I look at the evolution of the Facebook homepage i am reminded that it is not so much where you start but where you end up. You simply cannot allow your management team to rest on their laurels and past achievements no matter how successful or arduous a task it was to achieve. Strategic improvements must consistently be identified and executed speedily and effectively.
Facebook has grown to become one of the most dominant internet players of our time but they sure didn’t start out that way. Facebook set their site on what many proclaimed experts thought to be an insurmountable goal. In addition, their behemoth competition including Friendster and later MySpace didn’t view Facebook as much of a threat as these companies dominated the marketplace.
So, why did Facebook have a meteoric rise while their competition time and again lost market share? Facebook did many things right and their rise didn’t happen by chance. What is most notable to me is the path of continues improvement and incremental changes Facebook made to improve their platform including opening it up to application developers (smart move) once it launched. This is in sharp contrast to the closed environment with lack of enhancements and strategic improvements Friendster (just typing this name gives me the creeps) and Myspace took. In essence what you do with the platform and the changes and enhancements that are made once you launch are actually more important than what you launch with.
We are extremely proud of the current state of the Giantnerd platform and our launch but we are not naive. We have a lot of work to do and need to make the categorical improvements that will catapult Giantnerd ahead of our competition.
Giantnerd has a lot of exciting features that will launch in the next few weeks. We will simultaneously be working on both stabilizing the commerce experience and making the platform more social. From a best practices ecommerce perspective keep an eye out for improved search and navigation and a more efficient checkout process. From a social standpoint we are working on more intuitive ways for members to interact and participate in the social shopping experience.
In yesterday’s 4 hour marathon whiteboard meeting, (@jefflesser made the brilliant decision to supply us in the 25th hour with skittles to keep our sugar levels high enough to stay focused. ) we detailed a plan to make incremental improvements to the groups, Q and A wall and email notification functionality. We discussed a lot of ways to improve the platform but in the end, our highest priority items are ways to increase participation in the Gianterd community.
I will conclude this post with what is most important to our decision making process at Giantnerd. Nerds, what features do you want? We need your feedback so we can work tirelessly to make Giantnerd the webs best social shopping platform.
With Love,
The Head Nerd
