Mark Lyn­der­say

It's hard to get an­noyed for long with the team at F1RST, a new tech­nol­o­gy start­up that's gam­bling big on cre­at­ing a Caribbean In­ter­net plat­form de­signed to lu­bri­cate the sched­ules of to­day's con­nect­ed limers.

At last Thurs­day's pri­vate meet and greet for blog­gers and the me­dia, they were ooz­ing charm and wit. These mod­el-beau­ti­ful young peo­ple dress sharply and have a big idea that might just take off if they stop hold­ing on­to it so tight­ly.

The team sort of de­moed the project last week, lift­ing the cur­tain of the Web site's place­hold­er and sign-up page at http://f1rstt.com, but we didn't ac­tu­al­ly see more than might be de­duced from the pro­mo­tion­al ma­te­r­i­al on the ex­ist­ing site or the ex­plana­to­ry video.

It might be best then, to ex­plain ex­act­ly what F1RST hopes to do, but that's some­thing that the team doesn't seem to have an el­e­va­tor pitch for.

In­stead, they've de­vel­oped a way of talk­ing around the project in de­light­ful arcs and phras­es that may have made ea­ger fans of the 30 "Mavens" that they've re­cruit­ed to ex­plain the con­cept to busi­ness­es but that pat­ter won't sat­is­fy savvy users who are keen to kick the tyres of the site.

F1RST is a lit­tle bit Yelp, en­cour­ag­ing users to com­ment and rate busi­ness­es and ex­pe­ri­ences they find on the site, a dash of Foursquare, al­low­ing you to check in when you're at a hotspot, a hearty help­ing of yel­low pages, en­cour­ag­ing busi­ness­es to reg­is­ter their pres­ence on the Web site along with a gar­nish­ing of Groupon, giv­ing those busi­ness­es an op­por­tu­ni­ty to of­fer dis­counts to dri­ve traf­fic.

Since most of these ser­vices have on­ly a ten­ta­tive foothold in the lo­cal mar­ket rel­a­tive to so­cial-me­dia go­ril­la Face­book, F1RST has a chance to be­come the go-to re­source for this type of func­tion­al­i­ty in the re­gion.

If you have a broad­band-con­nect­ed smart­phone, and love to hit the town, this might well be, as they say, the bess ting ever.

So why, then, won't F1RST let you play with their new Web site?

The com­pa­ny has signed up more than 10,675 peo­ple in­ter­est­ed in us­ing the site since it launched its place­hold­er site but in­tend to launch when it has 100,000 ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est.

This con­fused me. No, let me be clear, this made my head spin. And I said so. Rather loud­ly, I must con­fess.

T&T ac­counts for 70 per cent of the signups so far, with 30 per cent from their oth­er two ma­jor tar­get mar­kets, Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos. Launch events and Maven-dri­ven #F1RST­na­tion pro­grammes are planned for those mar­kets soon, so their per­cent­ages will prob­a­bly rise quick­ly.

But right now, the site is be­ing used by around 50 peo­ple each day, part of F1RST's in­tern­ship pro­grammes with Costaatt, UWI and the Maple Leaf In­ter­na­tion­al School.

Ac­cord­ing to Kris Granger, the com­pa­ny's prod­uct mar­ket­ing lead: "A lot of the func­tion­al­i­ty has been com­plete for some time now.

"Our strat­e­gy is to com­pile rich and valu­able con­tent (busi­ness de­tails, pho­tos and re­views) to en­sure the prod­uct will be im­me­di­ate­ly valu­able when some­one us­es it for the first time."

This is ex­act­ly the sort of thing that sounds ex­act­ly right to busi­ness peo­ple used to the com­mon­sense ap­proach of prepar­ing a prod­uct and then bring­ing it to mar­ket.

The team, co-founders Nico­las Mal­oney, Kyle Mal­oney, Kiev Wilkie, Eesa Mo­hammed and re­gion­al di­rec­tors Dwight Scott and Yohance May­cock have been work­ing on the project for the past two years, spend­ing their own mon­ey to bring it this far. A cor­po­rate project, Novus Tech­nolo­gies (novustechltd.com) has giv­en them an op­por­tu­ni­ty to de­vel­op this con­sumer-fac­ing con­cept, but they are pro­ceed­ing care­ful­ly with F1RST, and it's too gin­ger­ly by far.

F1RST's beau­ti­ful team ar­gue the point with such en­gag­ing smiles you al­most want to for­get that the In­ter­net doesn't work that way.

Users want to par­tic­i­pate in build­ing a so­cial Web site, they want to get some vir­tu­al bruis­es and de­fend the oc­ca­sion­al tech­nol­o­gy col­lapse. They want to be cham­pi­ons of a great idea that's ris­ing from the murk of re­al­i­ty, not the own­ers of a shiny new toy.

It's the dif­fer­ence be­tween build­ing a ral­ly car and buy­ing a Porsche and the F1RST team is miss­ing a chance to court the folks most like­ly to re­al­ly work on build­ing their Web site while they fi­nesse the de­tails of bring­ing their shiny new eu­ro­car to mar­ket.

What they re­al­ly need to do right now is to kick down the walls of this well-man­i­cured gar­den to let more users carve their own de­sire paths through the site. The in­sights that ear­ly users will de­liv­er will of­fer them more use­ful feed­back that they will ever get from Mavens and well catered chats with me­dia peo­ple be­cause they will see quite clear­ly what their cus­tomers ac­tu­al­ly want.

But that means for­go­ing build­ing the per­fect struc­ture for the chaos of con­tin­u­ous user in­ter­ven­tion.

I think back to last Thurs­day and those smart­ly-dressed young men and women and I won­der if they have what it takes to en­dure the scrap­pi­ness of liv­ing in a house while it gets built.

�2 Read a tran­script of my in­ter­view with F1RST's Kris Granger here: http://ow.ly/adAll

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