The trouble with cool

It makes individuals, companies and products appear cool, but the trouble with cool is that more often than not you end up being a one-hit wonder. When your business premise is all NOW, it’s too easy to become yesterday’s man or woman. That’s one way of explaining the dotcom boom and bust.

The evolution of a one-hit wonder
When I began to explore the possibility of a management buy-in of Friends Reunited, so many people – respected business colleagues – advised against it, for the very reason that it would probably turn out to be a one-hit wonder for that very reason.
I knew they were wrong, because one of the things that really interested me in the company was its roots: housewife Julie Pankhurst sitting at her computer as a diversion from the travails of pregnancy. She wasn’t thinking in terms of user generated content or harnessing collective intelligence. She was just having a good idea. An idea, it turned out, which was so part of the zeitgeist that it would later take the likes of O’Reilly to adequately explain its full ramifications. I think you can learn a lot from that about how to turn what could easily be a one-hit wonder into a successful business opportunity.

Avoid the hype
At Friends Reunited we work hard to stay loyal to the company’s roots. We don’t sit around singing ‘we’re too sexy for our website’, expecting to meet ourselves walking through the door because we’re that far ahead. It doesn’t trouble me that I don’t start mentioning concepts like Web 2.0 as soon as I hear of them. I’ve learned that while you’re looking for the Next Big Thing or obsessing over the ‘right’ business-speak, you can easily miss potentially lucrative deals.

One-hit wonders usually start in the territory of niche markets. I think that if you focus on giving your customers what they want by delivering a simple website, you’ll learn more about them and be able to target similar but different niches and so grow the brand.
You’re more likely to turn a one-hit wonder into a two-hit wonder that way, and eventually into a very profitable concern. To do so you must be constantly looking for new ways of connecting people through the internet, and so, yes, it is essential to be open to new ideas – genuine ones.