To all SNS developers

[today]

Trust Greg to bring YMO up again.

Always can rely on you!

[NEW-START]

Business plans aren't a fundamental input to a business. I've heard of plenty of businesses that haven't created a business plan and are successful. Peter Jones once announced business plans as a 'waste of time' and that planning on the spot leads you to better success than planning the business years before it starts.

And Greg, **** off. Nobody here wants to hear another word of YouMeo as it's one of the worst social networks out there and under crap management.

[Pyroka]

Business is vital to social networks as they will get no where without it. Loads of people have ignored this fact, even ones I have worked with.

The best example is VIRB which has one of the best designs and best systems yet fails to actually produce a large income and has very little popularity. If they were to market it correctly it would quickly become the next best thing however that doesn't look likely since PureVolume makes them more in the short term.

Youmeo has a much better business plan than website at the moment that's why they've been working hard on building up a team for web development. On the business side of things Youmeo is rocketing but the actual website still has far to go. So we're like the opposite to VIRB however I'm spending 8 - 9 hours everyday just renivating pages and designs to make them perfect.

It is very vital towards an SNS, spot on. I think your description of VIRB could describe many other issues which SNS' on here have, they just don't have the business knowledge to do it. I'm not going to criticise your choice of SNS' you've chosen to show that example because frankly, it's a great example. Who knows, maybe in a year or so Youmeo will have hit the big time & everyone will know why: Because they had a business plan!

I love it how you can't do anything but bring in youmeo's plans over and over again. Is it THAT hard to answer a question without mentioning that god-annoying site now, it's just not needed to answer the guys question - so what if you have a business plan, the business plan means jack all when the site is in a very poor condition as many people would agree with me on that point.

At least he didnt go into resources, otherwise we would have to call an ambulance to get his head out of a place where the sun don't shine.

Me been a **** aside, I still don't think its that hard to run an SNS or 'community' based website compared to other types of internet business which are directly based upon sales. I still do agree that most SNS' don't have business plans, or know what they have todo to get a site running to a good standard.

I don't necessarily agree with you on how a bad SNS can't have a Business Plan. If the owner acknowledges that the design is bad, they can employ designers to make it better can they not? Then they can start thinking about features & not what, you've just gotta have the right mindset otherwise there really is no point and you're just wasting your time.

Just a quick input, marketing plans are included in business plans

I admit I was a bit uncertain on Marketing plans, cheers for pointing it out.

Business plans aren't a fundamental input to a business. I've heard of plenty of businesses that haven't created a business plan and are successful. Peter Jones once announced business plans as a 'waste of time' and that planning on the spot leads you to better success than planning the business years before it starts.

Seriously? I'm pretty surprised by that. I guess everyone has their own approach to it, but to be safe a business plan does help significantly. I see where this Peter Jones guy is coming from though; Jump straight into the market and get a headstart & then plan the rest as you go along. I guess there's risks to that, but there's also risks to a business plan.

ANYWAY, this goes for uploaders, housekeping tools, DJ Panels and whatever else you can think of. If you want it to be successful, you must first create a generic design (for DJ/HK panels) so that the client can think, "Ooo that looks nice, we can change this that this that" and then your final product is there. You can't do that though, without a damn business plan! How the hell will they hear about the product? You think they'll just type in DJ Panels and the first result for google will be "[Your Panel name here]"? No, doesn't work like that.

I do wish you would all stop arguing & ******** about past issues like the whole hosting argument (which I lost track of completely) because you lot could work proper good as a team... =/

[Excellent]

To me business / market plans aren't key. Advertising is key.. If you don't have any advertisements, you don't have users. Take a look at facebook, microsoft have a share in facebook so facebook will easily have advertisements.

People who plan on making an SN need to plan out what sites they will advertise on, how much this will cost in total, how many users they're looking to address, what ages. All these points are fundamental in my opinion. Just like Invent, he has done well, he has outlined that his SN is a Music Orientated SN already. He is looking to attract bands, music lovers.

Klydo; I really don't think you should bring YouMeo back here as it's hardly setting any kind of SOLID example. Dentafrice pointed out, poor security, easy to exploit. It also seems that all you do is have a laugh and no work? The first day I visited YouMeo I was able to see all the links that I should only see once registered. You should have never opened until the site is fully ready. All I see with YouMeo at the moment is a decent design which I think you're being used for..

On the topic of uploaders; These are getting to be a big thing with nobody being able to code one and using free ones. It's kinda' annoying to the fact that everybody will be relying on one uploader that 5 other sites are using.

[kk.]

The first sentence put me of reading the rest of your post excellent. What do you think marketing is? Its how your going to generate users.

[Excellent]

The first sentence put me of reading the rest of your post excellent. What do you think marketing is? Its how your going to generate users.

What I meant was you don't need 40 lines of marketing garbage to grab some Ad space.

[Innuendo]

What I meant was you don't need 40 lines of marketing garbage to grab some Ad space.

Business plan is how to get income, what will it provide etc.
Not, just for adspace.

And what was it you said? "I know more about business than most on HabboxForum"

[Source]

Klydo; I really don't think you should bring YouMeo back here as it's hardly setting any kind of SOLID example. Dentafrice pointed out, poor security, easy to exploit. It also seems that all you do is have a laugh and no work? The first day I visited YouMeo I was able to see all the links that I should only see once registered. You should have never opened until the site is fully ready. All I see with YouMeo at the moment is a decent design which I think you're being used for..

Thank you so much for saying that, as much as I tell him and Calum B on MSN they should close it down until it's finish, they remain a strong standing of how it should stay open. +rep for saying that.

Dentafrice was absolutly correct, me and him found ways to change password, status' etc.. for other people's accounts because fields were not properly filtered (mysql_real_escape_string, stripslashes etc....) which is really worrying when there are 400,000 users worth of information in there. And if you goto change your password, you can see your old password is in the fields as a value... so if you go into view source your password is clearly visable. Thus meaning password's are not md5'd and a huge amount of trust is needed to use the site.

Back to marketing, I think it is key. There is no point having advertisements on your site unless your are advertising on others to bring you a nice solid and active userbase. Of course the quality of the site helps on people signing up, as they may want to use some of the awesome features that are available.

edit // I await for klydo's defensive reply.

[Klydo]

Thank you so much for saying that, as much as I tell him and Calum B on MSN they should close it down until it's finish, they remain a strong standing of how it should stay open. +rep for saying that.

As we can't close the site, I've said to Calum that the site shouldn't have opened however it's not like the sites you get on here. It has to meet press launches and follow the business plan as it's not a "project" it's a business. Therefore we can't keep the site offline otherwise we wouldn't be able to secure investment and gain press interest.

In an ideal world we'd be able to run BETA and have the site offline for improvements however it's just not possible. Calum actually said he would love to have the time to run a BETA of the site before we open it but we just don't. So it's not us trying to annoy everyone and purposely cause issues with the system it's just how things have to be for now until we have a full team of staff in place.

[Source]

Thanks for replying in a dignified way. I am glad you have sense and agree it shouldn't be open at the current time.