There are some good lessons to take from Richard’s story of the death of a Web 2.0 company: Actual lessons from Kiko

Paul Graham thinks you’re screwed if Google comes into your space. I don’t agree. Neither does David at 37Signals. You will need to differentiate and play harder and smarter though. Just do it better. Google isn’t a ‘god’.

As Richard says in his post it wasn’t Google that killed them anyway.

Since all this, Kiko was put on eBay and sold for $258,100. Not too shabby.

My takeaways:

• Have a good plan on how to get customers outside the techosphere if that is your goal.


• If you are aiming for critical mass usership, you will need old school marketing, unless you can manage something incredibly viral. Tech blogs and news sites are great, but the techosphere is the consumer of these, not teens, managers and ‘office types’.


• There is a bubble. Be careful.


• Team burnout can kill a product.


• Fast release cycles are good and all, but you need to make a good impression first up. People are fickle, especially geek experimenters.. they are onto the next fun thing and won’t give you a second chance.