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Why This? Why Now?

My partner Tim Rowe always asks in our investment committee meetings, “Why This? Why Now?”. It is a great pair of questions. And ones every entrepreneur should ponder when starting their business. 
It is really two separate questions, each of which I would argue needs a convincing answer to place the company in the category of a “compelling investment.”

Let’s use Twitter as a case study here, as it is a relatively new company with a good degree of success defined at least through usage. Most readers of this blog will either use it or know about it. Many might debate the merit and uses of twitter but let me suggest that, at its simplest level, Twitter is about group messaging and self-expression, to groups of people you know, as well as to people you don’t know. Yes, it is also micro blogging and many more things. But at its essence it is about self-expression through group messaging (with some messages being more or less interesting or relevant to certain people).

When Twitter was born, it wasn’t the first messaging program. Not by a long shot. Before it came email. And Instant messaging. And text messaging. There were many ways people could communicate with each other. So why this? Why Twitter? Two reasons I believe.

First, Twitter made “group messaging” easy. Sure, you could send an email to 50 recipients (try getting that past most spam filters!). You could also trick many IM and SMS programs into letting you send group messages. But it wasn’t easy. You either had to set up a distribution list in advance or pick and choose the recipients each time from an address book. Not easy and not fun. With Twitter, you send a message and it goes. No need to think about the recipient list.

Second, Twitter let you send your messages to people you didn’t know, basically broadcasting them to the world – and let you read messages from people you didn’t know. It gave you an infinitely sized address book. Thus you could get your message in front of hundreds, thousands or millions of people. You could also satisfy your inner voyeur by following, and listening in on, people you didn’t know.

In this way Twitter distinguished itself from the dozens of companies out there (we saw literally dozens of pitches here) trying to provide a “unified in-box” for email, texts, I-Ms, Facebook feeds and more. Twitter was a better way to communicate. Not just a better way to organize your existing communication.

So, why now with Twitter? Again let me suggest two reasons. First is blogging. The blogging trend pre-dates Twitter’s success. With blogs, anyone with an idea or an opinion could put it out there for all to see. Problem is, except for a few well-promoted bloggers, everyone else was invisible. No one read their posts. Add to that the idea that most people might want to share a thought or an idea, and might do it frequently. But few people want to write 1000+ word blog posts with frequency. Twitter improved blogging by an order of magnitude. It did this by introducing micro-blogging through tweets. It also did this by making it easy for a blogger to find followers or readers. Tweets were searchable. Find something you like and follow the writer. Simple. But without blogging, the concept of Twitter might have been more foreign. Hence one of the “why now” answers. 

Second is Facebook – and its status updates. Facebook introduced the world to the status feed update. This update was short and personal. Like a tweet. Yet it was generally limited to your audience of friends. And along came Twitter. Twitter redefined the status update as shorter and to an open audience. But without facebook and the familiarity of its status updates, Twitter might not have had the second “why now” puzzle piece.

Why this? Why now? Two questions every entrepreneur should think about before starting your business. Answer the first and you have a good chance to stand out from the crowd. Answer the second and you just might hit the market at the right time. Answer them both and you probably have a good business idea.