Trains Planes and Ruby on Rails – Is speed the most important thing for a successful startup?

Trains Planes and Ruby on Rails – Is speed the most important thing for a successful startup?

Twenty years ago, I was reading a Graham Greene novel on a painfully slow train ride in Italy. In the book, he pointed out that your mood as a train traveller was directly proportional to speed.

Evan posts today about how the mood a Twitter HQ is directly proportional to the speed of the site.

I’ve noticed that many people running startups seem to have moods that are directly proportional to their Alexa rank.

I’d argue that fast response time is the unwritten golden rule of successful web apps. A site that is slow is like wading through mud. Before Youtube I could watch video on the web, but before Youtube, my expectation was that it would splutter and stall.

I suspect that focusing on speed is much healthier than traffic or, dare I say it, features. If you built a product with one great feature and make it fast, your traffic will come, people will understand what its about and the extra features can be added later.

Google had less accurate search than Altavista for a long time after they became hip (you couldn’t do exact phrase matching because ‘stop’ words like ‘the, of, and or’ etc. weren’t indexed), but Google was always blindingly fast and they kept focused on one things even as CMGI made Altavista pour portal crap around their nice search page.

And anyway, Graham Greene said nothing about Alexa.