In this way, your pool of users is much like the French invasion of Russia. When Napoleon first departed his home turf, he had a combined army of over 650,000 troops at his disposal. As the army marched towards their goal of St. Petersburg, they had to cross rivers and deal with increasingly cold temperatures which made the troops sick and disrupted supply logistics. Each river and temperature decrease acted as a barrier, causing Napoleon’s army to lose men to famine, disease and starvation. In fact, he shed 50,000 men in just the first two days of the march.

If you look at the graphic above, you’ll see how the tan line is fat on the left, representing the full army that departed, narrowing at rivers and temperature drops. Just as those things whittled away Napoleon’s army, so too can a website’s pool of customers be turned away by limiting factors. In Napoleon’s case it was logistics & disease, in your case it may be software errors, poor usability or price issues.

Let’s put it in perspective with a real example – we can speculate about the limiting factors of a website that takes your digital pictures and lets you print them on things like coffee mugs and mouse pads. When asked who a potential customer of such a site is, you might be tempted to say “anyone!” … because who doesn’t want a cool photo book or something, right?

Imaginary Service: A Website that helps you print your photos on products

Limiting Factors:

1. Who do we have the ability to sell this to?
   • US customers: 308 million people
2. Who has a digital camera?
   • Ballparked at 40 million americans in 2008.
3. Who has internet access?
   • Approximately 46% of those Americans.
4. Who wants to print photos?
   • A generous estimate: 30% of the aforementioned people.
5. Who is willing to upload photos?
   • A small percentage of the aforementioned people
6. Who is willing to learn to use the site/service?
   • A small percentage of the aforementioned people
7. Who finds the price acceptable?
   • Fewer still …
8. Who trusts your Brand, website and/or payment gateway?
   • Even fewer …
9. Who of all these people will see your advertising and marketing and respond to it?
   • A truly small number

* Napkin math: take figures very loosely.

So, as you can see, with just a few seconds of critical analysis, we have narrowed the list of potential customers from a number in the hundreds of millions to one that is probably in the hundreds of thousands – in a best case scenario. The exercise isn’t intended to be used as a tool to dissuade anyone from starting a project, but it should help project leaders frame their idea in basic reality. So, before you leap to fund the next spurious facebook app or complex group/social collaboration site, consider your project’s maximum potential with a skeptic’s eye.

At the very least, an exercise such as this can help just about anyone understand the need for simplicity and relevance above all else. Your project comes with enough limiting factors built in, you don’t need to add any more. Stay on the lookout for confusing business requirements, extraneous user experiences and technical errors.

1. Enthusiast: Propelled by researchers and hobbyists. May be difficult or awkward to use.
2. Professional: Monetized and adopted by companies who saw its value. May still be klunky, but performs a desired task.
3. Consumer: Now it’s not about the technology, but what it can do

As interesting as it is to consider how products such as cell phones or computers moved out of geek circles and into everyday use, I find it even more fascinating to see how this spawned a similar but different process for online applications and property. What’s similar is that there are still three stages, and they occupy a similar space. What’s different and interesting, is how the online medium has swapped the 2nd and 3rd steps creating a process that’s optimized for updated consumers and businesses.

The Enthusiast Stage
A website in the Enthusiast Stage may be difficult to use, poorly designed or slow to respond, having been constructed by someone who had a good idea but isn’t an interactive designer. That’s OK, because usability and design problems don’t matter to the inspired group of early adopters who value, above all else, what this new toy can do or how it’s done. What’s more is that this five percent nation comprised of tech zealots and netophiles becomes an evangelizing force that’s often instrumental in propelling a good idea out of the basement and into the blue skies of great solutions.

You’ll notice that adept marketers such as Apple really lean on the Enthusiasts, encouraging and utilizing them to give their demographic a creative energy that draws even more people. As business owners refine their Enthusiast Site or application, the Enthusiast Army provides frequent and often times brutally honest feedback – all while spreading viral awareness that eCommerce markets covet much.

Many sites, like many small businesses, never make it out of this stage. Walled in by steep growth requirements, the good idea cannot get out. But some do …

The Consumer Stage
The Consumer Stage is like the Enthusiast Stage, in that it is a means to an end. Many sites are now monetizing their service at this time, but still list the ever present “beta!” mark near their logo. Websites in this stage have started to take off, and are drawing a much larger audience, perhaps getting coverage on popular sites that don’t cater to purely geek circles. In some cases, the site or application might still be awkward, but if the accounts are free, users are generally willing to put up with it.

This is a critical time when things begin to snowball rapidly. Brought under the unforgiving glare of consumers with varied tech-comfort levels and hardware capabilities, some good ideas are weeded out at this stage. Often times the team doesn’t respond quickly to fix technical blocks such as server speed issues, glaring website UI roadblocks or unwelcome product features. Too often, product managers and business owners become emotionally invested in some future vision of their product, refusing to change even when overwhelming customer data is begging for attention.

The Consumer Stage is a time of naked honesty, pushing for success at all cost. The added users, larger net presence and likely revenue stream are not just requirements to move on, they are the very tools used to do so. The number of truly successful sites is pared down yet again, in a way that would warm Charles Darwin’s heart.

The Professional Stage
This is it. This is money. This is the big leagues. Websites in the Professional Stage have been cleaned up and successfully marketed to the world at large. Ideally, they have also developed B2B relationships, capturing customers from related markets and platforms. Data garnered from an endless tide of users and customers can be used to drive truly effective change, and sales volume can soar into truly astonishing numbers.

Now, the path narrows again, and a few more websites slip off the precarious edge. With all this success, you also get a slew of extra problems. The easiest ones to deal with are hardware, software and UI concerns. The solutions for them are quantified, and in all honesty, easily implemented. Out of disk space from storing images? Archive what you can and buy more space. Legacy site architecture can’t handle a trillion users? Hire a team and get it upgraded.

Like WW2 U-boats, the less tangible dangers are the true killers. Often times they lurk around until you’ve crossed some kind of boundary, a theoretical point of no return. Oops, you just alienated your enthusiast crowd with some random product feature change. For every fiscal quarter henceforth, your sales will soften. Oops, you designed a product that is a one-time sale to a diminishing market. Where’s your parachute? Uh oh, some business process or application architecture is going to cost so much to change that it might as well literally bet set in stone, taunting you from your manager’s office.

But What’s The Point?
The point is easy to understand, difficult to master. For a website to be successful on an undeniable level – for it to permeate the forebrain of global pop culture – it has to evolve away from any vestigial trappings that the creators may have envisioned. Like evolved technology, websites become successful because of what they can do for you. A customer or user might enjoy some animations, but what they want is your product. A person’s experience can be enhanced by design, fun can be increased by process, but ultimately a successful website has two qualities that can be summed up in one sentence.

“It’s easy to get what I want”

Curb Appeal is a term borrowed from the Real Estate industry that describes the instant impression that a buyer gets when pulling up to a house on the market. A good impression can cause someone to fall in love with a house before they’ve seen the inside. A bad impression might cause them to drive away without even stopping. Curb appeal can manifest itself the same way on your website, when a first-time visitor lands on your website and decides if it’s the right place or not. This article will discuss five things you can do to increase your website’s curb appeal.

Fresh and Relevant Content
Nothing kills curb appeal like a stagnant website. If someone arrives on your home page and the newest article is more than a few days old, they are already subconsciously downranking your website. I’m not suggesting that you publish content just for content’s sake. Useless content can have the same effect as obsolete content. What you might do is brainstorm some ideas and then rough out a schedule that returning visitors can become familiar with. They’ll come to know that you update at some regular interval and start to visit based on that.

Active Forums & Comments
It’s a viral effect, when a reader sees new comments, they are more prone to comment. It may be a cheap trick, but while your site is freshly launched, you would do well to aggressively solicit comments from friends, family and professional associates in the right circles.

Desired Content Up Featured Up Front
If you are a retailer, that means your top products. Your newest, best or most popular items – the items that most people are there to find – should be given special priority on your site. If you run a blog, it means new or popular articles displayed front and center, with an easy way to find articles that someone might reference.

A Design That Communicates Effectively
A user’s perception of your site is influenced by the design, but not wholly based upon it. A nice aesthetic may help communicate, but a sloppy design might also get in the way of your content. Keep in mind that almost nobody truly cares about the design of your site. People want the content.

Validation of Your Position as The Expert
If you want to be perceived as the expert, you’re going to have to do your part to grab that title and hold on to it. Although your site needs to stand on its own merits, a savvy marketing will also encourage growth and acceptance by promoting their site where applicable. Try going after some of these things as ways to establish yourself or your site as a leader:

• Positive reviews from users and customers
• Professional endorsements from market or industry peers
• Client list, featured here or success stories
• Guest authors, co-contributors and 3rd party content displayed on your site
• Good press from 3rd party sources – “voted #1 tech site by webmonkey” etc
• Award and Citation graphics

More reading on this topic:

• 13 characteristics of outstanding blog design