Speculative Success and YouTube

From John Dvorak's recent article on YouTube:

Two things seem to be at work. The first is the incredible desire people have to share video clips with each other. That's now apparent.

What's not so apparent, unless you actually have tried to use the various video sharing sites, is that nobody -- and I mean nobody -- made it easy until YouTube.

By merely combining a pent-up demand with ease-of-use you get the YouTube phenomenon. It's brain dead simple, but I'm telling you that is all there is to it.

Now, Chad and Steven (YouTube founders), most likely totally understood the importance of simplicity and usability, but I highly doubt they understood the depth of the impact they would have. You could have asked 10 people on the street a year ago, "Do you think that a site that allows people to post their personal videos will become one of the most visited sites on the net in the next year?" Then describe some of their 5 top rated videos of all time: Evolution of Dance (amateur), Pokemon Theme Music Video (amateur), The Simpsons Real Life Intro (from tv), D1大整古-流動廁所 (from tv), and Hey clip (amateur); you would surely be met with a WTF? kind of stare.

So, simplicity alone, as Dvorak stated, wouldn't cut it. It's the combination of the two: desire + simplicity. And that is why YouTube has been so disruptive.

From The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christianson:

Disruptive technologies...are distinctly different from sustaining technologies. Disruptive technologies change the value proposition in a market. When they first appear, they almost always offer lower performance in terms of the attributes that mainstream customers care about. In computer disk drives, for example, disruptive technologies have always had less capacity than the old technologies. But disruptive technologies have other attributes that a few fringe (generally new) customers value. They are typically cheaper, smaller, simpler and frequently more convenient to use. Therefore, they open new markets.

Basically, YouTube blew open a new market. All of a sudden, we looked around the Valley and saw oodles of startups as well as large technology firms getting interested in the space. TechCrunch posts a new company nearly every day that is coming into this space. And everyone is simple. Dead simple. And useful. And usable. And we all know that there will only be a few survivors remaining after the VC money runs out, so then the DESIRE + SIMPLICITY thing won't cut it any more....well, unless the desire to switch becomes apparent and you are the next simple thing that comes to mind.

Well, then what? I would never ever say, "Throw in the towel" because, as you know if you've been reading me, I'm all about entrepreneurialship. Competition is good. It pushes innovation. It gets us engaged. It's good for the customer.

But what I am saying is that unless the stars align just right as they did with YouTube (they knew about simplicity, but they sure as heck didn't estimate the demand) and you are truly offering something innovative, you probably won't seen the success of YouTube.

no matter how viral you try and make your service
no matter how free your pricetag is
no matter how many features you offer that your competition doesn't (see Kathy's excellent post on digital SLRs for how much people use all of those features - plus they make it less simple)
no matter who you hire to get you into whatever big publication or to create your clever messaging or buy that big billboard

YouTube had a few other things going for it here that you may or may not have:

1. They were early - they didn't try to analyse the current marketplace and determine whether there was a market or not. They knew what they wanted, so they developed it. From Fortune Magazine: "Hurley: Steve and I were at a dinner party in January 2005, and we were taking digital photos and videos. The next day we found it difficult to share the video files because they were too large to e-mail and it took too much time to get them online. We thought there could be a better way."
   
   
2. They offered something nobody else was doing...yet. Being the first isn't always the key to success, but since they were one of the first and were doing it right, they zoomed way ahead of followers.
   
   
3. They build relationships with their community. Maybe not as much now as they were in the beginning, but they still have features built in that help people posting their videos get viewers. When you are publicly posting videos, you most likely want to be seen by as many people as possible.

But these aren't forumlaic either. And...anyone who gives you a list of 10 things to do that will make your company wildly successful is full of beans. So, if you do the above, you may or may not be the company that will be the next YouTube.

Hell, even YouTube isn't the next YouTube yet. Proof to come?