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April 21, 2006
Low-budget Web Wizard On Content 2.0
After posting a list of German Web 2.0 applications last month, we noticed that Sven Eppert picked up on it listing some sites that are not mere clones.
Interestingly, three of those apps highlighted on his list were developed by one individual, Munich-based software developer Hendrik Mans.We looked him up, asked him about the work, and decided to publish the discussion.
We like his bootstrapping ways, and it illustrates that the entrepreneurial Zeitgeist, what Om Malik calls the "Do It Boom", has not escaped Europe. Besides it's hard to ignore a man with a chainsaw.
Mans' last gig was at SevenOne Intermedia, which belongs to television broadcasting company ProSiebenSat.1, where he developed websites for the firm’s TV channels. He's independent now, and the Web 2.0 efforts are undertaken in his spare time.
In the Q&A we got confirmation of a few things: newfangled applications for the Web can be created rapidly using Ruby on Rails and the development can be managed with low-cost software engineering applications.
Interestingly, the development mindset as Mans, and several of his peers, practice it is more like games development, than it is like developing content for other categories, such as static websites, ecommerce, or online news.
The applications hinge on involving users or site visitors to a great extent too. Motivation for the user to participate is typically promotional, e.g. promoting a blog or yourself to find a new lover.
As a result of all this, we're categorizing this as content innovation, as opposed to a disruptive technical innovation. With that in mind, such projects are probably not in the scope of a typical VC fund, but they might be eventually be interesting for corporate VCs and media and publishing firms.
a:c euro Which sites have you developed and why?
Next to my big projects, I like building small sites with an experimental nature, like dilemma5000.de and 25peeps.com, each of which only took me a couple of days to develop. I use these mini-projects to familiarize myself with the new features that keep cropping up in my web development framework of choice, Ruby on Rails.
a:c euro: The 25peeps.com sites seems to be popular, and even influential: this week we learned that podcast promotion site, 11seconds.com was inspired by it.
The main purpose of 25peeps.com was to try and see how people would end up using it. The 25 displayed pictures are sorted by their overall popularity, which is the sum of clicks on the pictures themselves as well as referals the picture owner has generated.So, in order to keep your picture at the top, you'd either have to upload an "interesting" picture (with the definition of "interesting" is, of course, left to the other users), or sending a large number of people from your own weblog to 25peeps.com.
It's interesting to see how differently people use the site; there are some female users who upload, let's say, pictures targeted at male users, but there are also many users uploading very creative photos, or simply sending enough people from their own sites to mine so their picture stays at the top.
My current big project, aufeinander.de, has always been intended to grow into a popular 2.0 dating/matchmaking service. It's not quite there yet -- some of the features in the current version worked well, others didn't.
So now I'm tackling a new version that will take the site into a slightly new direction, a luxury you can only afford with tools that rapidly speed up development time, and Ruby on Rails is such a tool.
a:c euro: How do you finance these projects?
I'm a freelance software developer, self-funding these projects. I'm a big fan of viral concepts, with sites feeding themselves with new content and users "automatically". It's a great starting point for bootstrapping a business with as little external funding as possible.
a:c euro: You say “bootstrapping a business”, so you believe your efforts can translate into sales. What makes you think these sites can be money-making businesses?
I look to typical web 2.0 (user-centric, networked) applications like flickr.com and del.icio.us. Sites like these don't require an editorial staff or a huge marketing budget; they merely supply a tool to the users, allowing them to go wild. It works wonderfully because it's a) a lot of fun for the users and b) very inexpensive to maintain.
It's interesting to note that the guys who made flickr.com were actually working on a web-based online game before flickr.com became so popular (flickr.com started out as a small-scale photo sharing site for the game's users).To come back to your question, people will gladly pay for a service that is useful to them (or plain fun, or a mixture of both, see flickr.com). When it comes to making money, people seem to have finally realized that the best way to make money is to charge for good services. If all you do is produce inanimate content, you'll have a problem convincing your users to pay money for it -- and that is what almost everybody was doing back in the "1.0" days. Come up with an idea for a service that fills a niche, and people will gladly pay for it. It sounds incredibly trivial, but only few companies out there seem to get it."
a:c euro: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Read - boom boom boom (gigaom)
Read - Web 2.0 applications in Germany (Sven Eppert blog)
Posted on April 21, 2006 09:58 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
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