Advice from a dying .com

Marcelo Calbucci worked for Microsoft as a development manager for 7 years when he decided to leave to start up his own company. In March 2005 after securing $1.3M fundings from VCs he started Sampa.com a ‘personal homepage service’ which allowed you to upload photos, video etc with the idea of sharing it with your friends and family. Now, unfortunately for Marcelo there were a couple of other similar startups on the horison namely Facebook and MySpace and last month after battling for 4 years Sampa.com folded.

Now Marcelo has written a series of 8 short blogs about his experience at Sampa.com where he details his good and bad decisions (http://blog.calbucci.com/marcelo-calbucci/brave-tech-world/Anything-and-Everything-About-Sa.htm). It makes for interesting reading and alot of it is very relevent to us as we help our clients breathe life into new propositions.Here is a small sample of the type of insights he relays:

For about 6-9 months into Sampa I was very much in love with the code and the platform I’ve built. But after the first Alpha and getting users asking some basic “how do I do this?” kind of question I quickly learned that your consumers and your partners couldn’t care less about your code. They didn’t care if it had 10,000 or 300,000 lines of code, if it was open source, if it complied w/ XHTML standards, if it used Tables or not on the HTML. They didn’t give a shit. No one gives a shit about this except developers. But we pat ourselves on the back every time we write well-documented, well-architectured and standard-compliant code.

So after that 6-9 months I just abandon my code and focused on how can I do feature X in the most efficient manner and please users. That takes a 90-degree turn in your thinking. When you care about users, you stop thinking like a geek and you start thinking about short and long term value. Don’t take me the wrong way, I still wrote shared libraries and well-compartmentalized code when I felt we would reuse it in a short period of time, otherwise I would just make the thing work. Later I learned that a lot of those concepts are called “Agile Development”.