I give credit to Loic Le Meur, I may not like Seesmic all that much as a Twitter App (though that might change) but he has head screwed on straight when it comes to developing his apps based around his user base.
Recently, Loic and his team released a new version of Seesmic Desktop for Windows. Why did he do this?
Seesmic’s users are nearly all Windows, approximately 80%. So Loic and his team responded accordingly, they built a native app for Windows.
In another words, Loic listened.
Loic and his team took all the data they had, analyzed it and made what they believed was the best decision for the majority of their users. If that means not developing for what you think is a better platform (Mac vs. Windows) then so be it.
The world isn’t Silicon Valley and if you are a growing brand, you need to start looking at the data and what you should do for users rather than the latest cool thing.
I would be willing to bet everything I have that if Seesmic would have released a native Mac client, blogs would have covered, highlighted and hyped the product to no end. But Seesmic would’ve been making decisions that benefitted a small set of their users, not the smartest way to invest time, money and energy, even if it does lead to more hype.
This is what makes Loic a good CEO. He is willing to make decisions that may not lead to hype, but benefit his users the most. This is like me choosing to do longer, more thought out posts that may not lead to huge sums of traffic, but benefits my reader instead of rehashing the same breaking news over and over again (which leads to traffic spikes, but not dedicated readers).
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@Loic Listening, Not Following
I give credit to Loic Le Meur, I may not like Seesmic all that much as a Twitter App (though that might change) but he has head screwed on straight when it comes to developing his apps based around his user base.
Recently, Loic and his team released a new version of Seesmic Desktop for Windows. Why did he do this?
Seesmic’s users are nearly all Windows, approximately 80%. So Loic and his team responded accordingly, they built a native app for Windows.
In another words, Loic listened.
Loic and his team took all the data they had, analyzed it and made what they believed was the best decision for the majority of their users. If that means not developing for what you think is a better platform (Mac vs. Windows) then so be it.
The world isn’t Silicon Valley and if you are a growing brand, you need to start looking at the data and what you should do for users rather than the latest cool thing.
I would be willing to bet everything I have that if Seesmic would have released a native Mac client, blogs would have covered, highlighted and hyped the product to no end. But Seesmic would’ve been making decisions that benefitted a small set of their users, not the smartest way to invest time, money and energy, even if it does lead to more hype.
This is what makes Loic a good CEO. He is willing to make decisions that may not lead to hype, but benefit his users the most. This is like me choosing to do longer, more thought out posts that may not lead to huge sums of traffic, but benefits my reader instead of rehashing the same breaking news over and over again (which leads to traffic spikes, but not dedicated readers).
So, startup CEO’s, take a cue from Loic.
Don’t develop for the hype; develop for the user.
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