We are now only a couple of weeks away from the BIG European conference LeWeb3 organised in Paris by my fellow Frenchman Loic Le Meur from SixApart.
I’ll participate to a discussion called “Can European companies go global?”. The answer is obviously “yes” but what’s more interesting is to figure out “how”. I will of course draw some conclusions from our own experience at AllPeers and in preparation for my talk here are my top 10 strategies an entrepreneur from a small European startup should follow:
1- Solve a global problem. At AllPeers we are addressing the issue of easily sharing large (quantity of) files with Friends, Family, Colleagues. Email was invented for text, FTP is for uber-geeks and web-based offers require uploading your private files to the cloud.
2- Target a global niche/community. Of course in our case, this is the very active Firefox community. Be the indisputable leader in your niche before trying to reach outside of it.
3- Release early, often, incorporate feedback from your early users and then launch. This is what we are doing indeed since the very first private beta in March of this year and the feedback we are receiving is extremely valuable as we are building the product to a level we feel it is ready for mass adoption.
4- Run a corporate blog in English. Be open about your progress. Thanks to this blog, we were picked up by TechCrunch and then everybody else.
5- Keep your costs down. Even if there is a bubble, even if money seems to grow on trees these days, have a culture for keeping your costs as low as possible until you start accumulating revenues. Having our development center in Central Europe is one of our biggest asset.
6- Plan localization from day one. The last thing you want to do is to have to rewrite your basic code to be able to go outside of your home market.
7- Build a multi-cultural team. Out of 14 people, we have 7 different nationalities in the team allowing us to compare and challenge how certain markets will react to certain messages.
8- Be original. Don’t import an existing concept. Sorry but this is just too lame.
9- Communicate on the US market. Journalists from other countries are reading the US news too and they will contact you directly.
10- Aim big. Be ambitious. The more difficult the task is, the more rewarding it is when it’s a success. I guess this is about self-esteem.
Extra bonus point: keep your sense of humor, it’s the universal language!
Richard Maven from e-consultancy.com caught up with Matt and me earlier this week and we talked about the current version of AllPeers as well as our future business model. If you want to know more about what we’re cooking, the whole interview is here.
Back in June, Wired editor Chris Anderson offered copies of his Long Tail book to the first 100 bloggers who wrote to him promising to review the book on their blogs.
I duly wrote in and received my copy. This was around the time of our public beta launch, and predictably it took me ages to finish the book. Since then I’ve been plagued by a guilty conscience for having failed to hold up my end of the bargain. So in an effort to assuage my remorse, here is perhaps the least topical tech business book review of all time.
I was blown away when I read Chris’s original Wired article, not because the idea of power law distributions was new to me, but because he encapsulated a revolutionary (for once the word is not an overstatement) shift in the media industry in a perfect two-word sound bite. Many people had intuitively grasped that something big was going on, but it was not until the article helped focus their minds that that they were able to put their fingers on what, exactly, it was.
Considering the success of the Long Tail article, one might justifiably question the need for a full-length book on the topic. As it transpires, the latter expands on the article’s theme along two axes, and its main weakness is that it tries to be two things at once. Is it a general overview of power law dynamics in the market, ranging from 19th century department stores to KitchenAid blenders? Or is it a treatise on the shift of power in the media industry from conglomerates to small content producers?
The latter is a topic that greatly interests me, and the book does a very good job of illustrating the changes currently underway in the entertainment sector. I’ve long argued that all three of the traditional strengths of large media companies — finance, marketing and distribution — are trending towards irrelevancy as digital content moves online. Chris singles out exactly these areas and devotes large sections (even chapters) to each one. He makes a bit too much of the idea that hits are an artificial concept invented by Big Media rather than, as I believe, intrinsically linked to human nature. He would do better to keep the emphasis more consistently on the rise of niche content, rather than the decline of mainstream fare. But overall his portrayal of how the media business is changing is one of the best I’ve encountered.
Applying the long tail concept to areas outside of entertainment strikes me as less interesting and more of a stretch. Worse, by trying to do too much the Long Tail ends up significantly too long (like so many other business-themed books). One of the defining tenets of “new media” is that content can be the length it wants to be, not the length that best lends itself to sales through traditional channels. The Long Tail is a worthwhile purchase and a good read in its traditional book format, but if it had applied its own conclusions to itself, it would have been an even better one at, let’s say, 100-odd pages.
Sasa, our Art Director, shared a new files with the whole team today with the following message attached : “New icon for your AllPeers folder”.
This is pretty neat so feel free to use it too to decorate your AllPeers folder where all your files are downloaded. The .ico file is here.
