I miss the Web 2.0 boom

Do you remember three years ago? It was a glorious time. Everyday brought a new webapp for... well you name it but odds were it was some sort of a calendaring, to-do list and GTD centric monstrosity. I LOVED IT!

It was similar to taking a test drive in a new car everyday and by observing their processes and looking at the logic behind them you could actually quickly pick up tidbits to improve your own personal work flow. It was fun. You saw great ideas that were implemented well and you saw great ideas whose implementation drove you near tears. You saw polished UI on systems that lacked any discernable use and you saw blatant rip offs other peoples functions and designs. The wild west of the web development. Eventually natural evolution disposed of the primordial slime and showed us the real winners.

The problem wasn't that most of the webapps that got dumped on the market were crap (but they were), barely functional (the new meaning of BETA) or that the market quickly became over-saturated, or that it was obvious that no one with business experience was involved in half the ventures. Or that no one had done any test marketing to see what price the market would carry. No, the problem was simply that these products were developed to cash in rather than solve a problem.

37Signals and Remember The Milk stand out as companies that not only survived the commodification of the productivity webapp market but thrived in it.

The 37Signals Story is well explained in their book Rework (shameless affiliate link) which is a good read but I wouldn't go ahead and fire your MBA management staff just yet. The reason they succeeded is because their products were the results of internal needs, it had a built in test market and opening it up to the public really brought very little risk for a company whose core-competency at this point had been custom development for 3rd parties.

It was simple, it was pretty, it was affordable and they made the lack of features their selling point. "Sure, you can get Salesforce.com but not only would you pay 10 times as much per seat license but you would be drowned by a sea of options that the average small and medium business user will never use. Think of the training cost you'll save... the tech support...".

I'm convinced the real 37Signals products are as much of a success as they are is due to the way its development came about. They identified an internal process that they could optimize with software. They developed the software for it, it fulfilled its mission and did it well. At this point they decided that it was good enough to go into the market place. Contrast that with Joe Q Doe looking at the plethora of GTD webapps and deciding to add another one to the mix to cash in on the fad. And sadly it really was a fad as most of the sites have since vanished.