Startable - Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

Along the lines of my recent series on what makes a good platform (part one, part two) Shaival Shah has a post on how Hunch uses its API to drive growth.

Nielsen has a great blog post on smartphones, Droid and mobile applications. Some of the most interesting points they make are:

• Over the next several months at least six new smartphone devices (like Droid) will be released - these devices are going to have large screens, keyboards and a wide array of applications.
• More smart phones are accessing web pages vs. “dumb” phones as of Q3 2009.
• 24% of cell phone sales in Q3 2009 were smartphones; Nielson expects this to jump to 40% in Q4.
• In 2011 50% of all phone sales will be smartphones
• In 2011 120 million mobile users will be on the internet, and 90 million will be watching video on their phone.

It is clear that we are finally reaching that critical tipping point in terms of mobile internet usage. (I guess we were already there, but now even a slow person like me can see it clearly.) But I believe that phones ARE the internet/computer for many people these days, and that there continues to be opportunity developing services, apps and sites specifically designed for these users. The evidence I’ve seen recently speaks to this point; in particular several of the Techstars mobile companies have really had amazing adoption.

Is Droid, for that matter any of these other new smartphones, going to really take on the iPhone and emerge as a real alternative smartphone platform? I understand that iPhone has a real lead in apps, but I don’t think the market is won yet (although I am a pretty happy iPhone user.) Blackberry shouldn’t be forgotten about either, since their market share is surprisingly large and I think grew to 19% of smartphones recently due to their new phones positive receptions. My gut is that at least BB and iPhone are going to continue to gain share real market share. I have no idea how Droid will do, but if it got 10+% market share over the next year or so I wouldn’t be shocked. And I think it might be good for the overall market if 3 competing smartphone platforms all had real volume.

I was at a private luncheon 10 days ago with Scott Cook, the founder and Chairman of Intuit. Coincidentally, Microsoft officially withdrew MS Money from the market on the same day - a huge achievement for Scott Cook and Intuit. When asked how he managed to stem off competition from Microsoft, this is what he had to say:

Solve Customer Pain Point(s)

Most companies are founded with an objective to solve a pain point but only few firms continue to focus on the customer after they have achieved success. What Intuit has done in the last 25 years and is relentlessly focussed on what the customer pain points are and then go about solving them. They engage the customer before, during and after each release cycle to ensure what they build is what the customer wants.

Delight the customer

Solving the customer pain point is not just enough but doing it in a manner that the customer loves it is what counts. The customer interact with a company and its products in various ways and various times. The post-sale customer experience is even more important than the pre-sale experience. How the product satisfies the needs, how accessible the company is (customer service) and how involved the user community is play a major role in enriching the customer experience.

These according to Scott, will create a loyal customer base for life and continue to generate word of mouth. When Scott asked Bill Gates what the main reason to acquire Intuit (in the mid 90s) is, Bill responded by saying that they could replicate everything that Intuit did but not the word of mouth. No wonder, Microsoft pulled out of personal money management market.