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    12月22日

    5 Things to Think About When Your Web 2.0 Startup Dies

    The number of Web 2.0 sites that fail and close up shop is going to increase rapidly. It may not be this week or this month but it will for damn sure happen in 2007. I'm not saying there is going to be a crash, but the runway will end prior to takeoff for some funded Web 2.0 startups and the founders of other self- or non-funded startups will just lose interest and shutter their sites or leave them to wither and die. I'm sure the TechCrunch Deadpool will let us know as it happens.

    Back in 2000 I was on the crew of a notorious (at least in Seattle) startup that flared out called mylackey.com, an online service where people could schedule local services like auto detailing, house cleaning, town car service, and dog-walking or just rent a lackey for a specified number of hours to run their errands for them. Back in late 2000 we were having fun, adding cool features, losing money on every transaction (we would make it up on volume), and generally enjoying our new digs and stylish furniture when one Friday morning we had an unscheduled company meeting. At the meeting the founders announced that we were closing up shop, handed everyone final paychecks and suggested that we hightail it to the bank to cash them ASAP. What I remember most about that meeting is the look on the face of one C.S. rep in particular who had just bought a brand new SUV. Did she foresee the crash and the end of high-paying customer service jobs to come?

    I did as I was told and cashed that check - quick. A number of us ex-lackeys hit the liquor store and then regrouped back in the office for a few games of ping pong before packing up our stuff. I did think to call and personally confirm that the town-car I'd scheduled to take me, my fiancée and my parents to the airport at 5:00 the next morning was still going to come. I was heading off to Belize to get married and enjoy a two week honeymoon. Good timing, huh? Not to worry, I landed on my feet just fine starting a new gig two weeks after my return.

    As an employee, I was grateful to management for seeing that we got final paychecks, though I was miffed that the vacation time I'd stored up was now useless. But what about the customers? Most probably just felt the same way I did when Kozmo ceased operations, sad at the loss of one type of convenience or another. Some may have had scheduled service providers that just failed to appear, and hopefully only a few had any more serious complications. I do feel bad for the small service providers that were owed money but weren't able to collect. The lack of features that allowed people to schedule recurring services minimized the number of complications (and mylackey's customer monetization potential).

    There are surely thousands of similar stories from Web 1.0 and the ethics of how you layoff employees may not have changed that much. So what's different this time around? Answer: Community and Connectedness. These are specific areas that warrant some thought before you shutter your Web 2.0 site.

    1. Community Content
    Does the content on your Web 2.0 site (the collective intelligence that has been harnessed) come from users? If so, have you made it portable/exportable and notified them that they might want to grab it before you turn off the lights? Good RSS readers make it easy to create an OPML file of your feeds. You could do the same for your content in the relevant microformat: hReview, hCalendar, hCard, vCard, XFN, etc.

    Your first instinct shouldn't be to license or sell the content to other companies unless your users have knowingly (not just in the fine print) given you that right and doing so would be in their interest. If you do, then they should have the same ability to edit, delete, or claim authorship for the content at its new home that they did on your site.

    2. Reputation
    Are reputations portable? There's a real lack of consensus here. Would there be any value in persisting or porting reputations from a failed site or service? If the reputation system is vibrant then real value has been created, no doubt, but the value of those reputations once the site is gone is questionable. The right of a site owner to port reputations is even more tenuous. I don't know, maybe the best thing to do here is let the site-specific reputations die.

    3. Web Services
    You'll probably shutter your web services along with your site, which makes sense, but do you have any web services that could be considered a public service and that don't depend on the same community or changing data that your site depends on? If so, then perhaps someone else would be willing to take over and power the service.

    4. Widgets
    Are you going to break someone else's site or blog by shutting down the services that drive your widgets? Not cool. Perhaps you can avoid doing so by at least persisting a snapshot of data that drives personalized widgets or forwarding requests to a different service for generic widgets.

    5. Links
    If Technorati or Wikipedia failed, how many other links across the web would break? Note: I'm not suggesting that Wikipedia will ever fail. Is there some action you could take to redirect those links somewhere that would be useful to users following the link without violating the intent of the linker? Maybe not, but if your site is link-bait maybe you can do better than a 404 or canned We're Closed page.

    Summary
    In short, even if your business (revenue) model didn't get traction in time, there might be other portions of your business that were successful and that constitute value, either to partners or to your users. If you can take that which is valuable and license, sell, swap, persist, port, redirect, forward, donate, return or give it away without violating the rights or intent of your users or other stakeholders, then maybe you should - and maybe you should plan ahead.

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