I’ve found the expectations that a small developer can break open a market with hardly any effort within these ecosystems to be naive (and so also the expectations of the breathless bloggers who encourage them).

In 1994 I put my friend’s chocolate store, Over The Moon, on the internet with a web site that let you custom-order boxes of chocolate and pay online (through some chicanery). Publicizing this site was easy because there were at the time only a handful of sites on the web were you could DO something, let alone PAY FOR something. So my expectations of having plenty of attention drawn to that site at minimal effort were met quite easily. NOW, were I to do the same thing, it would be a droplet in a pool.

For the first few apps in the Facebook, iPhone app store, or twitter app pools, getting attention and distribution were the easy part. When you’re one of a dozen it doesn’t require a lot of marketing smarts to get a good app sold. When you’re one of 11,000 however, the price of fame is much higher.

That doesn’t mean that the opportunity is diminished. What that does mean is that the cost of customer acquisition is likely to be much further away from free than it was for the early apps. Therefore, you’ve got to treat it like a business — and promote it like any other product — from Day One. Astonishingly, many investors are put off by this.

I think the answer to why that is discouraging says a lot more about the investors than it does about the ecosystem or the application in question.

Consumer Internet experts will focus more on the product and not worry about the marketing or promotion of their product. VCs will morph into the equivalent of production companies. There will be specialized shops that you pitch to help you finance, and promote your product. This is very much in line with the vision that Boris Mann and I have for Bootup Labs and is where it is similar to the way that TV shows are produced today.

I could go on, but this is probably worthy of a blog post on my own blog!