the Onda

So we've officially launched the public beta for Tabblo amidst two storms. The first one was the state of emergency declared by the state of Massachusetts due to the flooding that has been brought about by the interminable rain here in the Bay State. The second storm is taking place in the blogosphere over Josh Kopelman's post on the value of the 53,651 geeks who read TechCrunch and jump from beta to beta as all of these Web 2.0 companies launch. Josh's argument is classic Crossing the Chasm: these users, being on the leading edge do not translate to meaningful traction in the mass market. Dave Winer takes issue and points to how valuable these early users can be, and I tend to agree (for a nice summary of the debate, see Om's post).

Probably only about 10% of those 50K users are passionate enough to qualify for what I am about to argue but the number is large enough. In the social software space (in which I would include virtually every webapp out there), software without lots of users of early users will necessarily be worse than software with early and passionate users. Take for example del.icio.us and Furl: when they started, Furl was actually quite a bit more usable but del.icio.us managed to resonate with some of the early adopter crowd relatively early and within a year there was no comparison between the sites.

The argument has also been made that this early crowd is just too different and distracting from the bread-and-butter folks who make up the "mass market" but I don't buy that for two reasons that both center on this vague notion of the "mass market." These are people too, right? People who get out there and use MySpace or Gmail, or send TXTs to American Idol once a week. How then can we assume that because they haven't heard of digg, or del.icio.us, they wouldn't grok it right away if they did? The second point is simply this: if as a startup you have good product management on board, it's just not that hard to keep two lists: the features that the really important people who are helping co-develop your product want and get excited about, and the features that the fast-followers and "mass market" types want. I all about laser focus in startups, but it seems to me that if there is one place where it pays to keep your ear to the ground and be willing to experiment, it is in early user co-development of your service.

Speaking selfishly from Tabblo's perspective, I welcome every one of those 53,651 power users into our public beta even if you want to pick up your stakes and move on to whatever the hot launch is next week. There are worse problems than having a bunch of smart, well-immersed folks tread all over you for the opportunity to capture the hearts and minds of just a few of them. As Scoble writes, "one snowflake at a time."

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