Understanding the drivers of Web2

One of the things I’ll be doing in this blog is to write case studies of companies that seem to have interesting models, and discuss what we can learn from these models. A critical part of making a successful Web startup is understanding what are driving factors of success are for other companies, and how you can appropriately apply these factors to drive the user acquisitions/stickiness and engagement/revenue models/competitive advantage your own company. In fact, these lessons can be extend to any business.

An interesting article is the Wired’s Build a Web 2.0 Startup. Although this article is written tongue in cheek, I think that there is actually something to learn from it.

The authors facetiously point out that a web company can be created by mashing up ingredients from the above chart. Of course doing this blindly will probably not yield very good results (hence their article =). However, understanding the fundamental drivers and values, especially of the services and architecture components, and then applying them to real problems can potentially be an effective way to either come up with new ideas for startups, or help drive the success of your existing one. What is the core service that you are offering? How are you enabling this service via the tools that you provide and the architecture that you build around it?

Of course the above doesn’t mean that we should always be backwards looking.  We should also be looking towards future trends as well, or if you have the vision, maybe even help to set them.