There’s a lot of early adopter angst out there. As a company, and as a geek, I play around with new applications and ideas every single day. I have more accounts than I can remember, and certainly way more than I use (which to be perfectly honest comes down to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, find me and add me :-)) Each day another web2.0 company comes along that promises to revolutionize the way I communicate, the way I work, and we all know that all but a rare few quickly drop out of our rotation and our use.

Product ideas don’t come quickly, don’t come easily, and there is no such thing as a get rich quick scheme. Sure, there are exceptions, applications become platforms and grow exponentially, all of a sudden there’s another 23 year old millionaire, but that’s playing the lottery.  One thing we continually preach is building your business around a mission.

Take, for example, the guys from UGreekRow (full disclosure, an Intrigo client). They’re entering a market in which they’ve seen a couple other competitors launch within their niche hoping to capitalize upon the success of social networks, trying for that get rich quick bandwagon type mentality. Meanwhile, the guys at UGreekRow have taken a completely different approach, focusing on how their product can improve the lives of Greek members. Instead of taking your run of the mill social networking features and pasting them onto a niche site, they’ve spent countless hours researching and meeting with Greek organizations and members. Their goal was to understand the biggest challenges and needs of the Greek system, one which they were deeply involved with during their academic career, and one they deeply care about improving and promoting.  They have then built the idea for their application around using social tools to address the most pressing needs of the Greek community.

This hasn’t guaranteed their success, but it has given them a tremendous springboard to jump from. They already have a large group of users itching to sign-up, and more importantly they have tremendous credibility within their community. Rather than being just another social network, they’ve used their core mission of promoting and improving the Greek community to position themselves as a company that cares about their market, in so doing engaging and growing their community while giving them tons of flexibility for future growth.

I think that’s the beginnings of the recipe for a sustainable, successful company.