Startups – Lessons Learned

GeekFest Cairo 1.0Tarek Amr (@gr33ndata)

A Startup and A Toy

• Share your location with friends.

• Schedule Meetings and Events• Discover new places, cafes,

hotels, museums, etc.• Find Geotagged Photos, and

share new ones.• Find out what’s going on where.• More than 2 years of

development

• Safy ya laban!?• 15 minutes of coding.

Design: Cool or Usable

• Baralbait design is not cool

• I am not good in web design: I use tables instead of CSS and never used Photoshop before.

• But!?

Design: Cool or Usable

• Safy Ya Laban’s design is even worse (An HTML for dummies style)

• It’s not about being cool, but it’s how to make users do what you want them to do.

Design: Cool or Usable

• Adding one sentence in Baralbait increased users interaction there.

Know your audience

• Baralbait is for people to report where they are and find nearby interesting locations.– Yet it is mainly a website without a proper mobile

application or mobile version!

Content is the King

• A bot to show people their way!– Example: Baralbaiter!

• Grab content from other applications:– Examples: Brightkite-Twitter, LinkedIn-Twitter,

Twitter-API, Facebook-Connect.– Yet, API only is not enough.

• Incentives for people to add content:– Examples: Gowalla and FourSquare

Getting more social

• What happens is your application, shouldn’t stay in your application.

• Free marketing:– Every move you make; Twitter, Facebook, etc. will

be watching you.• Safy vs Baralbait!

You don’t have to know what your startup really is.

• Ok, I lied, I have to know what your startup is now, but not after a year or two from now.– Twitter: Who went to the bathroom, and who is

eating pizza now => Iran Election and Haiti Earthquake.

– Facebook: Keep in touch with Friends => YouTube Aggregator => Web-based Playstation => Twitter++ => ??

Follow your users!

• Users are your new developers.– API– Business and Strategy

• Be flexible and ready to morph your service to what suits your users more.

• After more than 2 years, Latitude, Brightkite, Gowalla, Foursquare, etc are born. So, Barabait is dead now, or not?