Google was framed

By Ian, on August 19th, 2006

trend(edited) For many observers, one of the key lessons of the Kiko tits-up episode is that startups need to watch out for the evil empire that is the Google Operating System. Mike Yamamoto’s comments in “Google, slayer of Web 2.0 start-ups” seem typical of the sort of conclusions being drawn. One of Kiko’s mentors, Paul Graham, says that this is an overreaction, but agrees that:

What nailed Kiko was Google Calendar. Once that came out, not only did Kiko’s growth stop, but a lot of existing users defected.

Google as villain, the new Microsoft, buying up or crushing their competition, seems to be the collective wisdom on the whole affair.

It’s easy to blame Google, but I think more important and less sensational lessons lie elsewhere. To start with, there are at least 15 online calendars out there (see Bob Stumpel’s big list of Web 2.0 applications). If you then look at online products with an integrated calendar as well as other features, such as Basecamp and BusinessITOnline, then there are probably dozens. The majority of the standalone products will fail. Not because they are bad, but because they face so much competition. Some of those calendars will be more usable, innovative and helpful than the others. Kiko was actually better than most of the products on the list, I think. I don’t believe it was the quality of their offering that killed it off.

You’ve also got to think about the sort of person that signs up for Kiko, and its ilk. The chances are that they’ve come from digg or Techcrunch. They aren’t looking for a business solution that solves a specific need. They aren’t migrating their enterprise calendaring system. They’re looking for something new and they’re interested in cool web apps. That’s how I signed up for Kiko. And 30boxes, and Google Calendar.

If your users are signed up to your service because it’s cool and new, then you need to watch out. If you can’t add features fast enough to keep it fresh, then they are going to leave as soon as something else catches their eye. It doesn’t matter if that’s Google or a tiny startup. Unless there is a business case for staying where you are, then the users will disappear as soon as Calendar 2.01 gets launched.

Viral marketing goes a very long way, and it’s really helped to democratise product development, but it doesn’t always help. If you can’t get the sort of user who is going to stay on your site, then it may be a wasted effort. Or a short-term boost at best.

Good web 2.0 services, or the ones that will survive at any rate, work by locking their users in. Think about flickr. Their free service allows for 20MB a month of uploads. By the time the next coolest photo site comes out, you might have hundreds of megabytes on the service. The thought of starting again is going to feel pretty unappealing, no matter how pretty the new service. Another good example would be MySpace. Why do you think the default pages look so bad? Why is it so easy to make friends? Because that way you’ll invest time and energy into making your page look slightly less awful. You’ll invest emotional energy into making, visiting and sending messages to all those friends. Want to start doing that again on another social network? I don’t think so.

If Kiko was able to lock users in somehow — and I think that 37Signals and Google have found ways to do this by integrating the calendar among a wider offering of products — then they would potentially have been able to last longer. It’s in very poor taste to offer this sort of 20/20 hindsight, though, and I’m sorry that they weren’t able to do more.

God willing, it’s not all bad for the Kiko guys. Paul Graham reckons they’ll be able to raise as much money from selling their code as they spent on launching and running the project. I’m told that writing calendar apps is by no means easy and hopefully they’ll be able to white box it to the enterprise space. And obviously, when they start their next project, they’ll have me as one of their first sign-ups…