If you're famous how hard can startups be?
I’ve seen a number of posts on how x was created: Digg, Stack Overflow, Think Vitamin …
There’s a common trait which I commonly point out on these topics. These people had a following - a tribe beforehand.
Imagine if you were launching a social news site. What’ll make you succeed? a great audience. That is fucking hard to do. But what if you could announce your product on a cable tv show with a massive audience of geeks? That’d be a nice marketing plan right there.
What about organizing an event - say a flash mob? Rob Manuel didn’t even have to try to get an audience - hell, he managed to start a chain of events accidently that led to over 2000 people flash mobbing Liverpool Street. If you or I had done that, it’d require a series events similar to what Seth Godin wrote about here. Good luck with that.
How did Rob manage this [very cool] feat? He co-founded the cult website b3ta.
However, the best example is Stack Overflow. Read Write Web and others have often hailed the genius karma reputation system the reason people stuck to the community. Nah, it was because Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood were rockstars in the world of development, and their two tribes were a large percentage of internet enabled developers.
If you can instantly get that critical mass - you’re made.
How can you or I ever launch a B2C site without our own tribes? Build a tribe? thats probably harder than doing real marketing. How does one start the Permission Marketing cycle online?
Whats your tactic? Get press coverage and roll from that?
I read about a company that was launching a community driven site and they paid for Google Adwords in hourly slots - so they spent their entire daily budget in 1 hour, the hope being in that 1 hour the site would sufficiently buzz.
The reddit founders made multiple accounts and talked and submitted links between themselves: 3 guys made the site feel like 50 guys.
Duckduckgo made a genuinely useful widget that won them mega backlinks, and therefore great google juice.
Tweetmeme have a great twitter “Retweet” button, that is really useful to bloggers and their traffic was grown organically by giving something back to the twitter community.
Hotornot was an inherently viral web application that exploded with growth thanks to the promise of boobies and self indulgence.
Some sites don’t explode to fame: it took delicious a few years to get tens of thousands of users. Even twitter was around many years before even the nerds embraced it.
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If you're famous how hard can startups be?
I’ve seen a number of posts on how x was created: Digg, Stack Overflow, Think Vitamin …
There’s a common trait which I commonly point out on these topics. These people had a following - a tribe beforehand.
Imagine if you were launching a social news site. What’ll make you succeed? a great audience. That is fucking hard to do. But what if you could announce your product on a cable tv show with a massive audience of geeks? That’d be a nice marketing plan right there.
What about organizing an event - say a flash mob? Rob Manuel didn’t even have to try to get an audience - hell, he managed to start a chain of events accidently that led to over 2000 people flash mobbing Liverpool Street. If you or I had done that, it’d require a series events similar to what Seth Godin wrote about here. Good luck with that.
How did Rob manage this [very cool] feat? He co-founded the cult website b3ta.
However, the best example is Stack Overflow. Read Write Web and others have often hailed the genius karma reputation system the reason people stuck to the community. Nah, it was because Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood were rockstars in the world of development, and their two tribes were a large percentage of internet enabled developers.
If you can instantly get that critical mass - you’re made.
How can you or I ever launch a B2C site without our own tribes? Build a tribe? thats probably harder than doing real marketing. How does one start the Permission Marketing cycle online?
Whats your tactic? Get press coverage and roll from that?
I read about a company that was launching a community driven site and they paid for Google Adwords in hourly slots - so they spent their entire daily budget in 1 hour, the hope being in that 1 hour the site would sufficiently buzz.
The reddit founders made multiple accounts and talked and submitted links between themselves: 3 guys made the site feel like 50 guys.
Duckduckgo made a genuinely useful widget that won them mega backlinks, and therefore great google juice.
Tweetmeme have a great twitter “Retweet” button, that is really useful to bloggers and their traffic was grown organically by giving something back to the twitter community.
Hotornot was an inherently viral web application that exploded with growth thanks to the promise of boobies and self indulgence.
Some sites don’t explode to fame: it took delicious a few years to get tens of thousands of users. Even twitter was around many years before even the nerds embraced it.
