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Wildly popular VC blogger Fred Wilson defines in an excellent 27 minute video the ten most important criteria he uses when deciding to give the gold, that is, fund a web application. Note, this video is from 2010, so no doubt the ideas are still valid, but the importance of mobile vs web apps has probably shifted to mobile, as Mr. Wilson says in a recent post: mobile is growing like a weed.
- Speed - speed is more than a feature, it's a requirement. Mainstream users are unforgiving. If something is slow they won't use it. Pingdom is used to track speed across their portfolio. A trend they've noticed is that as an application slows down they don't grow as quickly.
- Instant Utility - a service must be instantly useful to users. Lengthy setup and configuration is a killer. Tricks like crawling the web to populate information you expect to get from your users later makes the service initially useful. YouTube won, for example, with instant availability of uploaded video.
- Voice - Consumer software is media (magazine, TV, newspaper), each media property has a POV. Your software needs a personality/attitude. It can't be bland. The Fail Whale, for example, showed Twitter's personality.
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