Getting Past 1.0

I'm spending the end of 2010 thinking about how and what I do for a living as a product manager on the Internet.

In building a Web product from scratch, getting the basics built out is just the beginning of a startup team's journey. Unless you're brilliant or plain lucky, it takes a lot of work to figure out where to put your development resources to build your product into a vibrant healthy community.

I'm defining version 1.0 of a product as the first complete and usable version. It's not finished-- in some ways it's unfinished-- but it works. In the concept of a social application, getting to 1.0 means that you can find and add friends, create content, and do the business of what the application set out to do. With permission from the team at Top Prospect, I'm going to use their beta service as an opportunity to tease out how they can show momentum after version 1.0.

TopProspect is, in their own words:

a social recruiting company that rewards people for helping their friends find great jobs.

Not only that, but the company is founded and funded by a long list of high profile people.




This is obvious, but in order to start a social application you need to deliver the basics. Top Prospect has very early versions of a user profile, a network of contacts and the ability to add them, job listing and search results pages. Top Prospect is "complete" based on what the team set out to prove when they started building.

You can look through several interesting job opportunities and recommend people you know to these jobs. The problem is, there is only a small community of people on the service right now. I don't really have any people I can recommend.

In this 1.0 product there are handful of these dead ends. In particular I'm finding that the social connection model is in rough form. I find it really hard to find and connect with friends on this service.


Showing momentum to your earliest customers.
Getting past 1.0 means getting the ecosystem going by focusing on your customer and marching toward your business' goals. You can start by looking at how people are using your service, seeing if they're doing what you expected them to do, and making adjustments based on what is really happening.

In talking to the TopProspect team, it's clear that they know they have a lot of work still to do. My take is that they would be well-served by focusing on the following areas.

• Social density. We always debated what the right way to measure this was at Flickr, but fundamentally top prospect must increase its virality, average number of contacts per user, across job listers, connectors and job candidates. Get the right people to use the service.
• Vibrancy. Logging into top prospect experience results in a page of job listings. Tuning this homepage to show people/companies/job vibrancy is is one way to surface compelling experiences.
• Data and incentives. It's not clear to me what behavior I need to do to get the most out of Top Prospect when I log in. Show me what others are doing with trends, or tell me what behavior is rewarded on the site.
• Communications from Top Prospect. This is important on the site, in emails and on their blog can always be made clearer and more human. They are already doing a great job of this by reaching out with personal emails to early customers.
• Mobility. I don't think Top Prospect is an application that should lead with mobile, but they should certainly be sure to accomodate it. People do the business of job-finding when they're out and about, but top prospect isn't designed for this yet.