Since when have the opinions of non-customers mattered?
With almost every new idea, you see many posts here or on TechCrunch that say, "I don't get it, won't use it, or already use a similar app."
Most entrepreneurs actually listen to that. Why? Your goal is not to please everybody. Your goal is to release a product. Listen to the people who actually bother to fill out the feedback form because they love the idea and tell you ways to improve it. Those are the ones who WANT to pay you or use your product.
Money is a good barrier to entry that lets you only deal with serious people. But with a lot of new apps being free in order to boost their user counts, and lots of people registering for your service, you REALLY have to increase the filter even more, knowing that 90% of the people who signed up probably don't even care about the concept, as opposed to 1% of the people signing up for a paid service who may not actually want it.
A lot of these VC blogs are just spams to get you to to associate VCs with development. But, really, focus on your product, as VCs will always be there.
As a side note, for some types of apps, what customers say they want is usually the exact opposite of what should be made;) In this case you've really got to be determined in order to press on...
That said, I too absolutely despise the feedback: "I don't get it, won't use it, or there are a thousand similar apps out there"
Now that they've opened it up I consider Facebook to be essentially another web built on top the main web. One that has identity, messaging, sharing, networking, etc built in. Much more literally a web 2.0 than the other definitions of that term.
Assuming the Facebook guys don't do anything weird, it should be a marketplace much like the main web: survival of the fittest. Anyone who thought Facebook was going to let them skip the hard part of "making something users want" was just confused.
I'll be working on Facebook stuff long after the Techcrunch 50,000 has moved on.
For once I disagree, though: if the promise of Facebook apps was to go to a million users within seconds of launching them (which was the first impression), then being disappointed after five weeks could be justified.
Sure, there will be upcoming successful Facebook apps. But if Facebook is not that viral, why bother, and not go back to growing normal internet applications instead?
Marc spends a lot of time talking about the TC50K. I wonder what fraction of those folks use Facebook on any regular basis. Much like folks that don't use Twitter commenting on its usefulness, I think that the TC50K's opinion doesn't count when discussing Facebook.
I agree and I suspect the real reason is that very few people actually need all those consumer internet services or the gadgets built on their APIs. If something is useful you don't dump it after using it for a few weeks.
