Synthasite Beta Launch
I’ve been following Vinny Lingham’s blog for a while now. He is arguably one of the top internet entrepreneurs in South Africa and posts relevant and sensible content on his blog. His latest venture, Synthasite, a web-based publishing tool recently launched out of Alpha into an impressive Beta.
Rafiq has covered the launch here and is a great introduction to the site. I’ve played around with the tools and found it efficient and friendly. The templates are clean and usable and the functionality is slick.
What Synthasite has effectively done is solved a need. This is perhaps the biggest and most important consideration for any online startup, be they locally or globally focussed. It’s also the reason behind the success of News24, IOL, Amatomu, Afrigator, Muti, MyVideo, Zoopy, and many more: they all satisfy a certain need.
At the recent Facebook Developers Garage in Cape Town, I filmed an interesting live video conference with Dave Morin from Facebook.com. One of the questions we asked him was the problem of users perceptions of applications as spam. His response echoes the theme of this post: applications that add utility to people’s lives will succeed.
And so the same can be said for websites or start-ups looking to build a community, offer a service or provide content and I think this is the reason why Synthasite is going to succeed.
From a marketing perspective they’ve certainly been clever with their slogan: ‘Web Publishing for everyone’. It sums up their offering in one simple sentence. The coverage they have received thus far is a testament to their offering.
The real challenge will be getting my old lady to publish her website with Synthasite. Perhaps that would make for an excellent usability test ;)
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