Blogging and Drinking

… are not normally to be mixed, of course.

But a night out with my friend Dave Cruickshank has proven too strong a lure. Having set much of the Web 2.0 world to rights, the theme of ‘crossing the chasm’ versus ‘the tipping point’ became the main topic.

For the unini­ti­ated, these two books, both pub­lished in 2002, have a bearing on getting new products to market and achieving success as a business. The latter suggests that once thought leaders have decided to use your product, then its use can spread like a virus. Society suddenly seems to decide that X is desir­able. Crossing the chasm, on the other hand, as you’d imagine, suggests a con­sid­er­ably more pre­cip­itous route for new ideas and products. Getting from early adopters and into the main­stream, it suggests, is really quite a leap.

Dave, and a number of other UK start-​​up com­panies I’ve spoken too, reached the atten­tion of a number of thought-​​leaders when they first launched. Techcrunch cur­rently has 189,000 users. Getting that lot to look at you is quite rightly regarded as a major achieve­ment. Dave’s product didn’t ever feature on Techcrunch, as I recall, but it did get on digg and other social software indices. Briefly.

The trouble is that those 189,000 users aren’t actually the sort of people that are likely to want to use his service. You lot don’t matter either, probably.

The software is for new busi­nesses — when it’s only you and your friend, and maybe, after a while, a handful of other people — people for whom MS Office and Sage Accounting is overkill. It’s an online altern­ative to that sort of combination.

The trouble is, his users don’t really want to be at the bleeding edge of software devel­op­ment; yet being at the bleeding edge seems to be the only way to get coverage. Generally speaking, you don’t want to run your small business on radical software. Reliable tends to be a bit more important when your bills come in.

So who talks about this stuff outside of trade journals? Reliable business software? It’s not going to set the blo­go­sphere on fire. We’re not talking about the next gen­er­a­tion of tele­vi­sion; of radio; of news­pa­pers. The people that entrust their business to software like Dave’s aren’t the slightest bit worried about that, but nor are they talking. The reasons for that are beyond the scope of this post, but I’d suggest that carpet-​​cleaning, antique-​​selling and garden-​​clearance are probably of more import­ance to users than talking about the software they use.

And that is a major problem for UK tech start-​​ups, I think. Unlike in the US, where liberal VC handouts seem to avail­able to support the lamest ideas over their birth pangs, UK busi­nesses — in a far more scep­tical invest­ment climate — have to *cough* walk the talk from the word go. Since most busi­nesses require a little time and aware­ness to generate a return, however strong their business model, then I fear that many sound UK proto-​​businesses are never able to fulfil their poten­tial for as long as their main route to market is the very tech-​​savvy blogosphere.

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• Blogging Beyond the Boundaries
• Boom or Bloom?
• Draft: intro to blogging