Recently Michiel and I founded Tweetburner, a web service for Twitter that allows users to shorten, post and track links on Twitter. At the moment it’s being developed with a focus more on statistics.
About a minute ago I was browsing my feeds and I stopped at Techcrunch. As always a lot of startup and technews there. For me this is always relevant, but today something else caught my attention. When visiting the frontpage there wasn’t much news on start-ups, but there was news on the of the biggest software firms: Microsoft and Apple. And the news wasn’t good. Microsoft’s launched the long awaited Photosynth but couldn’t take the loads of traffic to their servers. Apple already launched MobileMe a few weeks ago, but it’s being chased by problems. At the moment they finally think everything is over, a major flaw in their service is unveiled. Their users are angry and unhappy with their products. Sounds logical, a titan should launch a reliable and working product.
As a start-up there is one thing you really want to happen, getting picked up by the media. After all the hard nights of work, receiving attention is what matters. But you never know when it happens. It is something where it’s hard to prepare for. Which causes a lot of start-ups to go off-line as soon as the media jump onto them. In other words, big trouble!
But going off-line is a good thing for a startup. When it’s happening to your bad ass startup, your users understand. In the first stage of your start-up, your users are loyal. They report bugs and accept the fact something isn’t functioning properly. Most of the successfull startups have the same experience.
Microsoft and Apple both had problems, major problems. Microsoft couldn’t manage their own servers (so in a sense, couldn’t work with their own product) and Apple lost email of 1% of their users. These are all big mistakes and people don’t like it. They expect a service from a titan to function properly and they certainly don’t expect a beta product with bugs.Titans, finish and test your products before launching. Simulate heavy traffic or make it beta, Google does it all the time.
Start-ups, run for that off-line moment. It’s one of the best things that can happen. Make sure to get back online soon. Keep the people informed with a blog and somekind of microblogging account. Going off-line is going to give you some negative feedback from some users, of course. But most of them will understand.
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