HARD LOOK STORY
Rich Skrenta, the founder and CEO of Topix, has a terrific and super-candid post on how his team is executing through a major make-over of their site and business.
Topix is an automated aggregator of local and national of news sources from hundreds of newspapers. Several major newspaper companies (Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Tribune) together own 75% of the company (here's a recent interview about the company with Rich, that provides additional information).
I've been a long-time fan of Rich's, who writes insightfully about the goings-on in the wild and woolly world of the web.
Here's a highlight of the candor, from this recent post
"We took a hard look at ourselves at Topix last year. We had built up a strong local audience on the site, but a lot of it was SEO, and while users were clearly getting some value out of our product, we hadn't made something that people really cared about. As cool a technical trick as our aggregated geolocalized news pages were, they actually pretty much sucked.
Thus began a six-month self-examination of why, exactly, our product sucked, and what we could do to un-suckify it."
And that's just the opening paragraph.
He then describes how the whole company was brought together in this process:
"This was a painful process. We crammed the entire company into a room, but no rah-rah speech this time. Instead we treated ourselves to a brainstorming session about why the site was lame. It was not fun."
If you're interested in what makes web businesses tick, this is a must-read post.
There are lessons in this still being executed make-over, for all web businesses, no matter how young or established.
One can only imagine, where a similar process at one of the larger Internet companies could lead.
At first blush, I really like the new Topix web-site.
It's a world aways from the Topix.net of old. Not sure if everything they're trying to do here will work, but I wish them a world of success.
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