AppStoreHQ Gets Personal

Sometimes it's the obvious stuff that's the hardest to see.

The AppStoreHQ team has been hammering away on all kinds of hard technical problems on the topic of helping iPhone owners find iPhone apps. But a friend looked at the site the other day and said something that stopped me dead in my tracks. Instead of using adjectives like "useful" or "helpful", he described the experience as "overwhelming" and "intimidating".

{Imagine the sound sound of screeching brakes}

Oh shit! We 've been so focused on our fancy algorithms and smart strategies for discovering and ranking iPhone apps that we lost sight of our customers. There are real people out there who are using our site to find iPhone apps, and they need it to solve their problem - ideally in a fun and easy way - not boil the ocean of iPhone app discovery just to prove we can.

The good news is that the first wave of user-specific features were already on the roadmap - Ian had built out the basic table structure for member profiles, wishlists, etc. in the early days - but we kept bumping them down in favor of other projects. But as soon as we grokked the idea that we were leaving our users out in the cold, we pretty much dropped everything to start down the path of making AppStoreHQ useful to specific people with specific needs, not just iPhone owners as a class.

We still have a l-o-o-o-o-n-g way to go, but today we're pleased to announce our first baby steps in the right direction, including:

• Member Profiles - One great way to discover new apps is to see what your friends are using. Use your member profile to save and share your favorites, and browse others' profiles to see what you're missing. (Want a closer look? Here's Ian's profile, showing his Loved apps).
  

• Wishlist - Something new catch your eye? Click the "Wish" button to save it to your personal wishlist. When we have enough data to make it interesting, we'll start showing you related apps based on your selections. (Want to see? Here's Brett's wishlist).
  

• Loved Apps - Has an iPhone app changed your life for the better? Click the "Love" button to add it to your profile and share it with the world. As with Wishlist, we'll ultimately use your Loved list to suggest other apps you might want to check out.
  
  
• Saved Searches + App Search "Mad Libs" - Are you always on the lookout for new golf games, Twitter clients or music apps? Create custom searches with App Search "Mad Libs", and save your favorites for one-click access. (Here are some of Chris's faves).
  

• Login with Twitter - Want to share your favorites with friends? Connect your AppStoreHQ and Twitter accounts and tweet your Loved & Wishlist apps and Saved Searches out for the world to see (or don't - it's up to you).

We're just getting warmed up, so expect to hear from us again very soon. And if you have ideas or feedback about what else you'd like to see from AppStoreHQ, *please* drop us a line.

Chop Wood, Carry Water

My recent conversations with several of our portfolio companies have reminded me of a Zen maxim that goes something like this...

Before Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

At Founders Co-op we focus on ideas that come out of the gate fast - they typically ship product, engage customers and start generating revenue within the first 3 months of operations, and several have hit breakeven at (or shortly after) their 1-year anniversary.

But we also like ideas that have longer-term strategic potential within their markets. Not suprisingly, establishing a market-influencing position takes more than a year or two. And unlike the "easy" wins of the first year, taking a leading position tends to be harder work - more nuanced, more dependent on partners and with less linear progress toward the goal.

Several of our companies are now in or entering this second phase, and the founding teams are having to recalibrate their expectations about how quickly they can achieve the goals they've set for themselves. These are great, often profitable businesses, so this isn't a heavy task - once they get their heads around it the teams are motivated and energized by the challenge. But no matter how quickly they achieved the early milestones of market acceptance and financial stability, there's more hard work to be done - chopping wood, carrying water - to carry their businesses to the next level.

BigDoor Media, Lessons Learned and Second Acts

Keith Smith just announced the public launch of his new company, BigDoor Media. The thesis behind BigDoor was formulated and refined by Keith and co-founder Jeff Malek in their Icarus-like journey at their previous company Zango (a.k.a. 180Solutions). As Keith acknowledges in his launch blog post, Zango was built around a powerful insight about online monetization via superior targeting, but forgot to take good care of the actual source of that money - the consumer - and wound up losing everything they'd worked so hard to build.

Andy and I have known Keith for a long time - we boostrapped our previous company, Judy's Book, in part by consulting to what was then known as 180Solutions, and Andy remained involved as a board member until almost the very end. And while we may have differed with Keith about the path he ultimately took with the business, our admiration for him as an entrepreneur only grew as we watched him work to build - and fight to save - the business he had created. Keith is hands-down one of the firecest and most mature entrepreneurs we've ever seen, so we were naturally interested to see what he'd choose as his second act.

Like Zango before it, BigDoor Media is an online monetization platform. But as Keith notes in his launch blog post, all the lessons from his prior company have been baked into this new venture, including the following:

• Be good to consumers. Monetization of users and content by its very nature is not going to be directly welcomed by consumers, but it absolutely has to be consumer friendly. The most classic example of this is with network television. Nobody likes to have their TV show interrupted by ads, but doing so was a model that worked for years for the industry. But there is a balance. 22 minutes of show and 8 minutes of ads can be stomached by users. 8 minutes of show and 22 minutes of ads would have resulted in TV sets all over America being turned off and audiences would have dried up. The world has now shifted and this model is showing its age, but the underlying consumer behaviors still remain.

• Don’t be adware. It doesn’t matter that our move into adware was based on logic that was sound and motives that were pure. Adware became known as a public scourge and trying to fight a broadly based perception is like spitting in the wind. We don’t ever want to write broadly distributed client-side software again.

Founders Co-op is the lead investor in Keith and Jeff's new company, and we're very excited about where they're headed. We expect the investment to raise some eyebrows based on what people believe about Keith's past company, but we know more about that story than most folks do. We made the investment based on a bedrock conviction that Keith is going to apply *all* the lessons he learned at Zango to build another big business - including the need to take care of the consumer along the way.