If you are building a video sharing site [say youtube], the first question that you will encounter is: “What if people upload porn and copyrighted material?”
If you are building a photo sharing site [say flickr], the first negative question that you will encounter is “What if people upload porn or plagiarize other’s photos?”
If you are building an ecommerce site [say ebay], the first negative question that you will encounter is “And what if people share their email/phone details and complete the transaction offline?”
And what if and another what if. Another what if and the product idea goes out of the window! Right?
To be successful, better ignore these “what ifs“!
Agree? Disagree?
Let me ask you this – If you are being asked to build a road, what are the steps you will take to accomplish your objective?
Design, Build, Launch (i.e. inaugurate, open for public) and then you bring in a traffic police to control the traffic – Right?
Similar to what you do with software products too, i.e. design, build, market, get more users and then bring in policing.
Negative Spaceman, originally uploaded by karlequin.
Or will you do the other way round – i.e. get traffic police and then build the road?
No. Right?
I come across several such discussions where a good idea is smashed ruthlessly because the ideator just can’t answer any of the above negative questions.
If you were YouTube founder, how would you trustfully say that users will not upload porn or copyrighted material? How can Flickr founders confidently say that they will not allow site to be a porn sharing portal?
Infact, most of the initial feedbacks regarding your idea/product will be on the negative side of things – i.e. “what if” kind of questions.
Everybody expects you to deploy traffic police, much before you start designing the road.
But the reality is that 99% people are good (courtesy: freakonomics) and as a startup, you just can’t design your product for the rest of that 1%.
I do agree that one needs to think of other ways to tackle that 1%, but definitely not your top priority/ objective (atleast during the initial days of the product). Not till you hit a major customer base.
The key here is to invest your time in building a community that can deter bad guys from entering the system (digg?wikipedia anyone?).
What’s your opinion?
Thought to ponder: As a startup, do you really need to do policing? An obvious answer would be ‘yes’, but I have different perspective on this.
But before I share mine, why don’t you share your perspective/thoughts?
An interesting read: Flickr’s mantra of building online community
I think some initial policing should be there. initially ur customer base is small, so policing anyway wont cost u much ( in terms of time, may be yes.) but it will also help increase the base of good people. Because good people come to places where there are good checks for bad people.
Great post Ashish. I totally agree with you. Exactly the same thing happened to me when we planned to launch rivals4ever.com.
Now my startup is built on hatred of passionate people and thus it becomes obvious candidate for abuse from day one. But even after 6 months we have not encountered a single such case where we had to block user or a rivalry for abuse. People are truly good to startup and you dont have to worry about policing from day one.
In fact in some scenarios non-policing initially may boost your traffic for e.g. porn materials on your site may increase traffic initially and after some time when you have enough traffic get rid of those materials and notify your users in kind words
Excellent post.
When you come up with an idea the thought is to act as a devil’s advocate and bring out the positives and negatives of your idea.
But the point to be kept in mind is that in trying to counter the negatives we dont kill the idea itself. But how does one do it?
How does one play the Devil’s Advocate role to perfections?
It is easier to say that dont let the negatives kill the idea.
How does one go about playing the balancing act? Cause you dont want to start a business on an idea and then find out the not properly looking at the loopholes cost you the business itself.
I am in agreement. Being a UGC site, one of the most common questions we get asked by well-minded folks is “what if users add junk to the map”. To that we say – we havent seen enough of it to design for it. In fact we even removed the “signup” barrier after experiencing the “99% phenomenon”.
Agreed that you really dont need to do any policing while desinging/constructing the road, but atleast designer should know the areas where we need policing after launching the road for public. Desginer should know in advance the probable caosing areas in advace so that he could design such a way that policing required is minimal.
So even its true fact that we should not kill good ideas beacause of these negative questions, its equally tue that we should never ignore them totally.
Finally what I feel is, instead of stopping working on good ideas beacause of negative queastions, we should take these questions as the input criteria or constraints to our desging and work on idea in such a way that post launch policing required is minimal. And one more thing, whatever care we may take the above mensioned 1% people always find some loopholes on which we have to work post launch. So these kind of questions helps to minimise this work too.
So never kill good ideas due to negative questions but take this as inputs to your ideas.
Cheers and Have a Good Day!
Guys
I am talking about business ethics – do you really need to do policing?
I am not really talking about product design practice here.
Do let me know what do you think about policing from a business perspective.
IMHO one shouldnt start designing a product having the rogue users in mind. As you yourself pointed out 99% understand and you dont want to be sweating it out for the rest 1%
Coming to business ethics, users are quick to understand your stand on ethics. Youtube thrives on piracy. Though they have a flagging system in place most users dont really care uploading copyrighted content cos they understand Youtube would rather fight the legal battles and retain content that would bring viewers.
In the case of Flickr, its understood that they care for the culture of the place and hence the number of users violating it will be very less.
Its ones own choice as to what stand one has to take on business ethics. In any case, in my opinion, its not a great idea building your product that tries to answer the negative questions.
Waiting to know what exactly you think!
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Great post ! This is very true.