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by Fred Grott.
Original Post: StartUp Engineering Social Platforms in Chicago
Feed Title: ShareMe Technologies LLC-The Mobile Future
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Sometimes no tech people fail to grasp the exact complications of developing a social network platform. And certainly the mythical project posts on craigslist.org with individuals wanting a facebook or linkedin clone complete din one month by one developer for all of $500 does not help.
Usually to get 10% of features of a platform you see somewhere else but are attempting to re-invent for a new market takes the same amount of hours as the user usable original prototype of the platform you are attempting to copy. In the social network platform case its an average of 20,000 hours to get that first user usable prototype. The person with the money does not make the rules here, as it has to do what is technically feasible using the development tools, processes, and computer language frameworks at hand at this moment.
Its not possible to reduce the amount of development hours because the person in charge usually is comparing 10% of the features of the mature social network platform to original prototype and they are not the same. And since most budding Social Network Platform Start Ups want their own and not to use someone's apis a drastic expectations shift has to happen for those types of projects to be successful.
One of the expectations that has to change is that the prototype will be able to be deployed to multiple websites as single applications. Facebook can does this because it has a mature api set that took more than the original 20,000 hours to complete.
The only solution if you are a Chicago Start Up seeking to build a Social Network Platform is to drop all those multiple domains that you might have and accept that the user usable prototype that you want to show investor sis going to take one full year to develop. Anything less or short of that is making a a foolish adventure that fails evry time.
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