Cracking the Top 10

I joined Kiltr.com a professional social network for Scottish people (and people who just love the Scots) a few weeks ago. As a proud Scotsman (is there any other kind?) I’d love to connect and do business with people from the homeland. Despite that desire, I have to admit that several weeks later, I have barely had time to log in. This points to a common challenge for new web startups – getting mind share from users in an increasingly busy online World.

I don’t have a reference for this, but I heard from a few people that, generally speaking, people have 10 web sites or services that they use regularly. So, if your company wants to hit it big time, you need to displace an app, service or media company that is currently in people’s top 10 lists. That, of course, is no small feat.

When I think about my “top 10″, it includes many of the usual suspects: Google reader, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. These are all very large companies. There are very few startup offerings that make it and those that do are ones that I run my business on: Freshbooks, Tungle, Highrise, Nirvana. What is not included in this list is a whole host of apps and services, like Kiltr, that I have signed up for, but have yet to bake in the habit of using regularly.

So, as you plot your goto market strategies, my message to you is that you need to be in your users’ “top 10″ list or you won’t win. What that means in practical terms is:

- Start with a small niche of target users that are fanatical about your offering. If Kiltr as an example was just targeting Scottish startup types, I’d probably use it more.

- Until you get in your users’ top 10, you will experience high churn rates (people will stop using your service or visiting your site). This will really limit your ability to grow as the value of each user will be low.

- Focus on building a compelling and simple user experience that people get instantly. If I need to invest time to figure something out, I will probably just move on.

- Recognize that it takes many years and lots of capital to hit the mainstream.