The Power of Sincerity
August 17th, 2006 by Dominic Canterbury
Here’s a great post about what it takes to succeed in the new economy: 5 reasons why you tube and flickr are successful 
Some highlights:
1. Do Something Better
2. Believe in What You Do
3. Community is Everything
4. Be Soulful
5. Be Authentic
Why it’s important
Flickr and YouTube are phenomenally successful and they got that way by breaking all the rules. Instead of telling us how badly we needed their product, they actually listened to consumers and gave them something they wanted. In other words, the dialog has reversed. If you’re not sincerely listening to the customer, they’re not going to listen to you.
With youtube at least, I would say that they succeeded in giving customers something they didn’t know that they wanted. People were certainly clamoring for photo sharing through flickr, but YouTube created a market. Far more people are creating short videos now that YouTube exists than were before, while I doubt there are many people taking pictures just because they can post them on Flickr.
That brings up an excellent point. People rarely know what they want. Sure they’ll tell you in detail what they think they want, but really we’re all just articulating a close aproximation. That’s why consumer surveys tend to lead to nothing useful — or at least nothing brilliant enough to capture a target market.
As for YouTube and Flickr…I’d say they’re really pretty similar. Photo-sharing is an obvious idea. People already wanted. A survey could have told them that. But what Flickr gave the world — the brilliant user interface and assorted intuitive bells and whistles — seem to have emerged from sincere understanding.