"A lot of the early growth, however, had to do with the features and what our competitors were not allowing people to do...
On Friendster, if you were a band and you made a profile, they would delete it. They didn’t want bands on their site. If you made a profile for your company or for where you lived or a neighborhood or an idea, you’d get deleted. We recognized from the beginning that we could create profiles for the bands and allow people to use the site any way they wanted to. We didn’t stop people from promoting whatever they wanted to promote on MySpace. Some people have fun with it, and others try to get more business and sell stuff, like a makeup artist or a band, and we encourage them to do that...
We saw a need to develop a community for artists to get their music out to the masses. With MySpace, when they went out on tour, they could actually tour nationally. The band might have 20,000 friends on their list and send out a bulletin saying, “I’m going to be in Austin on Tuesday night. Come see our show.” It has allowed bands to make money on music without having a deal...
In the early days, there were a lot of bands signing up. They told us that they’d like to post their lyrics and tour dates. Users told us what they wanted to see, and we just built it. That’s how we do a lot of our updates. We catalog what people tell us that they want. It’s not super-complicated...
Another trap that people fall into, when you start to grow and there is a little bit of success, is that people get on the soapbox, like pundits and venture capitalists, who tell you how to run your business. It’s important to be very disciplined in terms of not listening to them. We were resolute to do what our users wanted. Having discipline and saying no is why we ended up being successful."
(Q&A: MySpace Founders Chris DeWolfe And Tom Anderson - Forbes.com)
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