Learning From The Kiko Crash: Too Little, Too Late

There is ongoing murmuring about the lessons to be learned from Kiko's shut-down (the ebay auction still has no bidders, by the way), along with my earlier post.

Don Dodge suggests that "calendars are a feature, not a company." Hmmm. His point is that calendars -- a la outlook -- have become immutably linked with email. I think that in the perfect world, standards would allow us to have interoperable email and calendars from different vendors, but the reality today is the opposite. This suggests that Kiko was doomed from the outset. (Note: By this analysis, a company like Foldera, on the other hand, that lumps together project management along with email and calendars, has a chance.) Dodge goes on to dismiss Google's calendar as "a forgotten novelty." We'll have to see about that, Microsoft man.

Scoble uses his moment in the Kiko roast to complain about Google calendar, because the hippies at Podtech are making him use it. He also points out that the challenge for Podtech is exactly the same as those confronting tech start-ups like Kiko: you have to convert real users at some point, not just the trendoids.

I had to go fairly deep in the thread to uncover thoughts from folks involved with Kiko, to see what they think we should all learn from the company's demise. Here's Richard White, a designer on the Kiko team, who suggests the biggest misstep may have come from missing a critical window, and being blindsided by 30boxes and Google calendar:

[from Actual lessons from Kiko]

We were on track to release the new version of Kiko in the middle of January, when we *lost focus* and starting working on something totally different altogether. This was obviously a suicidal move in hindsight as it cost us 2 months: Kiko 2.0 launched on March 15th instead of January 15th. During that time two important things happened:

1. 30Boxes came out of nowhere and launched on Feb 14. Thus becoming the new internet calendar darling.
2. Screenshots of Google calendar were leaked and posted all over the internet.

The combination of those two events meant we got very little press coverage for our launch (or re-launch) since everyone was holding their breath for Google Calendar or fixated on 30boxes.

He makes the case for staying focussed, and not wandering off the plan. But he goes on to make the case for releasing early, but not too early:

You always hear "Release early, release often", especially if you hang around Paul Graham crowd, but the footnote that doesn't get enough airplay is that you shouldn't release too early (queue the sophomoric jokes in 3.. 2..). You only get one shot to impress people; don't blow it because they won't coming back next week to see if you've improved. Kiko 1.0 was released in September 2005 and was met with much fan fair [sic: fanfare] for being one of the first AJAX calendars on the web. Unfortunately, the user interface was pretty bad (which is how I pushed my way onto the team) and people generally said "wow that's cool… next!" The obvious problem is that when we launched version 2.0 I think the general reaction was "Kiko? Seen it. Hey how bout that new Google Calendar coming out?".

Perhaps the number one argument I have with my start-up clients is about "how much is enough to get out the door in release 1.0?" I have had several clients in recent months who have released products that I believed lacked the minimum feature set needed to a/ capture attention of the digerati, but even worse b/ failed to have enough in them to allow viral uptake: the social dimension was lacking.

So, I think that Kiko -- like many others -- really wound up releasing with too little of the social dimension in place. That seems to translates to "too early" -- but not really. We shouldn't mistake time for space. Yes, in practice, waiting until you have the critical functionality that will allow social spread of a social app means that you have to wait longer, given fixed capital. So, I am all for releasing as soon as possible, but never before the critical mass of social functionality is in place.

Everything that can be created in any social app needs to be sharable, and that sharing has to include the obvious circles: specific individuals, specific groups, everyone I know, the whole world. Then, on top of that, all sorts of social gestures and communication need to be threaded throughout: events should be taggable, to-do's assignable, calendars viewable and editable by others, events should support comments, and so on. Releasing a calendaring tool with less than the full complement of social support does not mean that early adopters won't kick the tires, but it means that the obvious ways to pull others in to try the app are blocked, or are at least too hard.

The moral of the Kiko story, from my viewpoint, is not about timing, and it's not about being blindsided by other apps that stole Kiko's thunder. And it's not that there is no hope for a calendar that insn't integrated with email, although there is some justice in that comment. The real moral is that when the web is social, you have to get the social dimension right, even more than the non-social functionality. I will put up with not being able to create PDFs of my calendar, or all weeks starting on Sunday, but I will not adopt a calendar (or any other tool, really) unless the social architecture is complete and intuitive.

tags: social+architecture, don+dodge, robert+scoble, foldera, kiko, podtech.com, calendaring, richard+white

Comments

[Richard White]

Very good point about the social aspect of the application. I'm heading out for vacation, but I'll try and put up a response sometime this weekend.

[Don Dodge]

Stowe, My view is that Kiko failed because they didn't have paying customers or advertisers to support them. They ran out of money and died.

Kiko was not killed by Google Calendar. I contend that Google Calendar is a forgotten novelty based on the fact that they have almost no market share.

HitWise tracks usage and market share of all kinds of sites and services. Here is a link to a recent market share study. http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/05/google_yahoo_and_msn_property.html

HitWise says that Gmail has just 2.54% of the email market compared to 42.4% for YahooMail and 22.9% for MSN Mail.

This isn't Microsoft Outlook email...it is MSN web email numbers they are comparing Gmail to. No Windows distribution advantage for MSN Mail, this is comparing web app to web app.

The numbers for Google Calendar are worse...far worse. They don't even show up on the radar screen.

Gmail and Google Calendar had nothing to do with Kiko's failure. It is just a convenient excuse for poor product planning and no business plan.

[Richard White]

Don, If you read my post you'll find that we *did not run out of money*. Please feel free to read it and email me any questions you have on the subject, I'd be happy to clear up the confusion.

And I don't know where you got the idea that Gmail and Google Calendar are a convenient excuse for anything, because we haven't used them as an excuse. In fact we've been telling anyone who'll listen that the idea that we were pushed out by Google Calendar simply is not true.