Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps

http://www.techvibes.com/blog/fred-wilsons-ten-golden-principles-for-successful-web-apps

by roblewis • 16 years ago

105 21 16 years ago

limist• 16 years ago

This seems to be the same talk given back in March 2010 and discussed on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140596

Regardless, useful points worth keeping in mind.

stcredzero• 16 years ago

Looking at this list again it makes me think that HN is not in the category of web sites Fred is talking about. It's obviously successful, but it doesn't follow a lot of these recommendations.

tsmith• 16 years ago

It was the same talk, but re-given yesterday at Toronto DemoCamp #27. Fred mentioned that he had given it a few months back in NYC.

lyal• 16 years ago

Great post.

dmix• 16 years ago

Why is REST relevant to a web apps success?

In the comments he mentions "it makes the app shareable on blogs, email, social media if every resource/page has its own URL". That's true, unless of course when 75% of your URLs are behind authentication, which is true with every paid app.

So the connection between sharing and REST doesn't make much sense.

Why not just say: make it easy to share? Or provide clean URLs for APIs?

rokhayakebe• 16 years ago

I think all he meant by REST was "Have an read/write api"

auxbuss2• 16 years ago

I agree. Eat your own dog food. Use your own API. If you aren't doing that, in most spaces, then there's more friction to scaling.

Course technically it doesn't _have_ to be REST, but that's the buzz of the now.

catshirt• 16 years ago

Far be it from me to question Fred Wilson, but I actually believe he is not referring to an API, but is referring clean URLs.

The reason I think this is because the second half (of the two sentences) on the RESTful section says "...every resource on your site needs to have a URL and ones that people can understand". Additionally, there is another section for APIs called "programmable".

Seems like a minor misnomer, but still a good point.

jcromartie• 16 years ago

Clean URLs go such a long way towards making a system flexible. Being able to bookmark important items, being able to implement features with a simple hyperlink, and things like that.

stevefink• 16 years ago

REST is not just about being easy to share or for clean URLs. A service orientated architecture, such as REST in this case, let's you branch out to multiple clients outside of a web browser much easier and faster. Think iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, etc. By providing a read/write API, your other clients can easily consume your product and you will avoid the hassle of tailoring your backend for each individual client by remaining platform agnostic.

david_shaw3• 16 years ago

Interesting article about principles for designing a successful web app... if you're the only user. There are zero references to security mentioned at all. As a security engineer, this bothers me a little bit.

A lot of people don't understand that security holes in their applications aren't usually caused by a 0day in their framework, but instead sloppy security practices in the application itself. I break web applications for a living, and although I appreciate the consistent business, entrepreneurs and developers on Hacker News should understand that a critical hole will cripple their business.

Take some time before you let other people use your app (other than internal testing) and do a few simple checks:

- Am I sanitizing user-supplied input in my application? Can I throw a ' in a userid form, or will it break my SQL statements?

- If I put ''";<xss> in the search bar, and view source, are > and < symbols floating around the page?

- Am I relying on security through obscurity? This is a big one. "Oh, no one will find the hardcoded password in this world-readable configuration file six directories deep" is how infrasctructures get destroyed.

- Am I handling credit card data myself? Do I need to be PCI-DSS compliant?

These few questions will prevent 90% of XSS, SQL injection and CSRF attacks if you carry them out thoroughly. Don't realease a buggy webapp just to get hacked.

brlewis• 16 years ago

He's defining success in terms of potential popularity. I think security is important, but empirically, security seems irrelevant to most apps' popularity. Many apps have stayed popular after major security breaches.

david_shaw3• 16 years ago

I completely agree, and just wanted to reply to touch on this point a little bit.

You are correct that the article (rightfully) provides a forumula to create a popular app. Sure, there are lots of technical details that weren't touched upon in this article, and certainly we are not going to enumerate each of them and criticize the author for not creating an end-all be-all make-the-best-app-ever article.

However, I do believe that security should be a primary concern from the very start. Think about security early, think about security often. Once your app is already popular with 500k active users is not a good time to realize your oversight in security, leading to a possibly fatal breach.

ludistan• 16 years ago

Carsonified team actually put up the original video of Fred's talk from FOWA 2010 Miami, with the same points: http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/fred-wilsons-10-golden-prin...

jmulho• 16 years ago

Thanks. The talk itself is way better than the summary.

darwinGod• 16 years ago

I think a lot of points mentioned/not mentioned in this article are debatable...Security,Features,Target audience... But this article by Evan Williams is almost timeless( written in 2005, Pre Zynga, pre Facebook) http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp

Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps

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