I signed up for the class. In the confirmation email is a pitch they should've used on the class page:
Finally, perhaps one anecdote will give a sense of what you will gain from the course. In 2007 a relatively small Stanford class of 75 students wrote apps for the then-nascent Facebook platform. Within ten weeks, the students had amassed more than sixteen million users and one million dollars in revenue. And that was five years ago, before the worldwide installation of hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets. What will happen today once we have 100,000+ students learning startup engineering in parallel, building apps with mobile platforms as a first class target?
Well, I think what would happen today is that those apps will be buried in the noise of Facebook app streams and will be less successful (in expectation at least) than their 2007 counterparts (unless the course comes with an equivalent focus on marketing efforts for such apps). There are just so many more commercial apps with heavy marketing resources behind it, that the average student app would unfortunately have a much tougher time getting the attention of eyeballs.
I was in that class, and wrote an app that got 1 million users. That sounds good, but honestly, it was a mistake on Facebook's part. They made it much too easy for people to spam their friends. The most successful apps in the class tended to be ones where you just sent a "hug" or a "kiss" to your friends, that kind of thing. The lessons of the class (optimizing a viral loop) are still useful, but it pains me to see anyone overly impressed by it.
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I signed up for the class. In the confirmation email is a pitch they should've used on the class page:
Finally, perhaps one anecdote will give a sense of what you will gain from the course. In 2007 a relatively small Stanford class of 75 students wrote apps for the then-nascent Facebook platform. Within ten weeks, the students had amassed more than sixteen million users and one million dollars in revenue. And that was five years ago, before the worldwide installation of hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets. What will happen today once we have 100,000+ students learning startup engineering in parallel, building apps with mobile platforms as a first class target?
The link it refers to is: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/technology/08class.html?pa...
Well, I think what would happen today is that those apps will be buried in the noise of Facebook app streams and will be less successful (in expectation at least) than their 2007 counterparts (unless the course comes with an equivalent focus on marketing efforts for such apps). There are just so many more commercial apps with heavy marketing resources behind it, that the average student app would unfortunately have a much tougher time getting the attention of eyeballs.
That being said, I have enrolled :)
Good idea. Will update the page text to include this in our next revision.
I was in that class, and wrote an app that got 1 million users. That sounds good, but honestly, it was a mistake on Facebook's part. They made it much too easy for people to spam their friends. The most successful apps in the class tended to be ones where you just sent a "hug" or a "kiss" to your friends, that kind of thing. The lessons of the class (optimizing a viral loop) are still useful, but it pains me to see anyone overly impressed by it.