Apart from my co-founders and I, none of my friends are technical. Technically I’m non-technical too, the only programming language I ever started to learn was html and I gave up fairly quickly. While this is a disadvantage for a founder in that I can’t program anything myself it also means I don’t have the curse of knowledge. I have more of an idea of how a mainstream user sees the Internet.
For example, here is a complete list of technology companies people have heard of:
Microsoft
Yahoo
eBay
PayPal
Napster
Google
YouTube
Skype
Apple
Nintendo
Sony
And here is a comprehensive list of technology company founders people have heard of:
Bill Gates
I was having a conversation with a friend and when I mentioned Steve Jobs, my friend asked who he was. This person has two iPods and a general interest in technology but he still had no idea who Jobs was. It surprised me because I see him as one of the most famous people in the world. But then I’m into tech.
It made me realise what mainstream users care about is having products that are easy to use and that work. So the iPod is famous but the man behind it isn’t. What got me thinking about this topic was finding out more about Persai and realising it relied on RSS. I don’t have any stats but I guess the percentage of people using RSS is minuscule. I installed it for a while and it just wasn’t any use to me. Either I search for stories on Google news or I go straight to the blogs I like.
I had the impression that Persai was some kind of browser plug-in which could track likes and dislikes to serve more relevant results than Google. The fact that it is built on top of RSS severely limits its potential adoption. I assume they have plans to take it beyond RSS but if not I smell trouble.
