VentureBeat has a post by Igor Shoifot about “the ingredients to success in todays brutal Web 2.0 world.”
1. Work: get customers by resolving real pains, listen to them, create what they really want/enjoy, more importantly – co-create with them, address technological issues of scalable growth, build multiple revenue streams, greedily capture the key distribution channels by being valuable to the channels, incentivize, put low cost at the foundation of your growth and assure that growth brings business, not just eyeballs (that is, unless you are in a magnificent real estate business a la Youtube/Skype/Myspace).
2. Play: give customers real and compelling reasons to come back, and often, get their creativity going, make them enjoy (better: compete) expressing themselves, turn them into your best marketers by honestly serving them better than anyone and by passing as much value onto them as you can (or even more!), build viral growth mechanisms (and, no, incessant daily emails reminding your users to buy something are not a viral growth channel).
3. Shut up: If you really-really want to succeed for sure, then forget about everything else in life and concentrate on what youre building, that is, yes on #1 (working) and #2 (playing).
