First, what creates a successful app? Just read this pretty cool article titled “Money Can’t Buy You Love: Why Some Apps Work, Some Don’t“. Thx Eli.
Summarising the entire article, 2 words. Happiness and Utility. The customer must be happy using it(ease of use), and it must do something that allows the end user to do it easier, and better.
Yes, you can go all day telling me how Color is not about the consumers, how this is about collecting data(which i personally find offensive). But at the end of the day, you need people to use it. It doesn’t really matter what the Board thinks, or investors think. It what your end users think that matters. Because, they are the ones who will be giving you the data. It’s quite shocking that the ‘rock-star’ team of Color fail to realise this. Yes, the 41 million investment has given Color ALOT of publicity over the past few days. But if you realise, many of the people who downloaded the app has written negative reviews on it, and it’s still a 2 Star app on iTunes Store.
And quite clearly, they haven’t used their own app. Other than this, there are alot of complains that the apps crashes under 20 seconds. Personally, I don’t follow the whole crap about software design, design patterns, and all that bullshit that conference-going dudes love to talk about. See why here. But I abide by 1 fundamental principle in all my code. It has to work. And I’m proud to say that I’ve yet to deliver a program with very obvious bugs that crashes without the end user doing anything, at least for real world projects. In fact, the only code I’ve written that I can recall failing to work is Problem Set 2 of CS3217. If my code crashes, I’ll just remove that feature, reverting to the last working set.
As for why this is a pretty good deal for Sequoia Capital? Well, they’ve got the whole world talking about them now. And when new startups want to form, who will they find? Sequoia Capital of course. Because they’ve heard of them. And they heard these guys give out money for apps that crash.
About Me 
Feed RSS | Subscribe Feed 
Twitter | Follow Me 
See my CV 
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
RSS
I think what worries me most about Color is the sheer SIZE of the investment round. The idea itself seems pretty okay – and I’m sure it might succeed given time. But when you take so MUCH MONEY … you’re handicapped in some ways.
It’s true that too little money kill startups, but too much does as well.
Yea, but the really shocking thing is, they actually gave so much for an app that reportedly crashes within a minute of it launching on some devices. And while the idea of using it to mine for data can be pretty good for corporations, end users either don’t like it, or dun really care about it. I still fail to see what’s so attractive about it. I suspect it might go down the route of chatroulette tho.
Yeah your are quite true on fact that the fundamental behind any app is it should work!
But regarding funding by Sequoia, what if Color makes it big and ‘somehow’(people at color aren’t that bad too ;) ) things get better? How much it will be worth? Obviously more than $50 mn.
the same can be said about many startups. What if the “Share the air” startup actually makes it big? Obviously it will be worth more than 50mn too. But that’s a big what if. Same for this.
LOL Sequoia Cap doesn’t need that kind of publicity. They are well known to be one of the best, if not the best (i.e., most capable), venture capital firm.
When they decided to invest, the app was probably not programmed yet.
It’s a major lack of quality control. Give them some slack, they may bounce back strongly.
eh dude, you need to read more carefully. I’m not blaming Sequoia for the app crashing.
Plus this is a rock star team. They should have more pride than this. No excuses.