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Question for FB app developers: How do you avoid becoming a 3rd-tier Slide.com?

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Strategic question for Facebook developers
During lunch today, an interesting question came up amongst a bunch of Facebook developers:

How do you avoid becoming a 3rd-tier Slide.com?

It seems like beyond the first couple players – Slide, RockYou, and others, there’s a huge drop-off for small teams who have raised <$1MM and trying to compete. Problem is, when you look at a company like Slide, they have 10-25X the number of people, 100X the funding, 100X the valuation, and 1000X+ the reach.

I’d be curious to hear how people are thinking about this?

My main thinking about this would be to pick some type of vertical – either by industry, demographic, media type, or something else that raises the bar for defensibility. It makes it much harder to be a "fast-follower." Anyone who is working on a purely horizontal communication basis will run straight into the Slide/Rockyou wall.

Any other ideas here?

Written by Andrew Chen

February 8th, 2008 at 3:29 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

« The design of social spaces
What’s happening with the top Facebook apps? »
  • CG

    Since these companies only build lame, meaningless apps (superpoke, funwall, glitter text, etc), focusing on something that actually builds some real value should prove to be defensible ;). Do they only use virality as their criteria for new "products"?


    If you're a small team who can focus on building something that isn't incremental to a slide, rockyou, et al. app, I wouldn't worry about them being that fast to follow. A couple of Facebook developers are to Slide as a start-up is to an established tech company; same points of advantage.

  • Kavin Stewart

    Hey Andrew, it was nice meeting you at lunch today. I think you bring up some good points, but their reach is more like 4x that of some of the larger independents. At least on Facebook.


    I'm going by the number of installs listed on adonomics -- same holds true for other relevant stats.


    Drop me a line, I'd love to continue this debate :).


    Kavin

  • Build something relevant and engaging.


    Don't try re-inventing the wheel (aka don't make yourself a "me too"). You don't need tons of cash to achieve this; you only need some good ideas, launch quick, test and make it a continuous improvement process.


    Also don't try to be everything for everyone. In other words, focus. Whether it's for a vertical, a media type, a demographic or something else. If you find a winning combination then build on it (user growth and make it defensible).

  • I spoke to the Stanford Facebook class on exactly this topic. Link here:


    http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/business-models-for-apps-and-widgets/


    At the time, I concluded that there were two winning strategies:


    1. Be an "at scale" portfolio of broadly focused apps (like Rockyou and Slide). [Disclosure: Rockyou is a Lightspeed portfolio company]

    2. Pick a vertical with a double digit CPM opportunity (typically something with endemic advertisers and high budgets like movies, fashion, auto, health etc) and drive a deep, highly engaging app. [Disclosure: I'm an investor in Flixster]


    Note that I don't hold these points of view because of the investments, but rather I made these investments because of these points of view.


    Since then, I've concluded that there are also opportunities in social games since they have the combination to drive both viral growth and high engagement, and open up the possibility for digital goods business models. Link here:


    http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/games-20-social-gaming-on-facebook/


    This isn't to say that small teams can't make a good living out of building good engaging apps. They can make very nice lifestyle businesses. But they may run into trouble if they try to build very large, valuable companies for the reasons that you outlined

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