Guy Kawasaki recently posted an enlightening story about what it took to get Truemors online. He even presented the numbers at the recent Launch Silicon Valley event in front of 150 entrepreneurs, reporters, VCs, and bloggers.
Before we continue, I need to disclose that I think Guy is one of the most approachable and personable icons in Silicon Valley.
His post’s title cleverly dropped all the buzz words to draw people’s attention and sarcasm, “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09.”
Truemors, the MasterCard commercial:
Software development – $4,500
Legal fees – $4,824.14
Logo – $399
Domains – $1,115.05
Worldwide smackdown – Priceless
Kawasaki commented, “During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.”
According to his post, Guy learned four valuable lessons launching Truemors:
1. There’s really no such thing as bad PR.
2. $12,000 goes a very long way these days.
3. You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.
4. Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.
He’s right on 3 out of 4 of these. Unfortunately, there is such a thing as bad PR. While the link love has had positive effects on Truemor’s traffic, the bad publicity fueled countless attacks on Guy’s credibility – all which will remain in the blogosphere for quite sometime.
Whether or not Truemors, or his post, were good ideas, Guy was just trying to fall on the sword with some humor, dignity, and character.
Well, at least he has 12,000 new points to spend on his Mastercard.
Other voices on the subject:
Matthew Ingram – “What he should really be saying is `How I Wasted $12,107 On a Site That Serves No Purpose.’”
Tom Abate
Valleywag - “We are supposed to take from “the numbers” that Guy was just trying to learn some lessons about Web 2.0 startups, but Truemors does not reveal new lessons, it shows Guy needing to rationalize bad PR, something he hasn’t faced so acutely before.”
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Discussion
“Unfortunately, there is such a thing as bad PR.”
I agree 100%, but for a different reason than you do. There have been countless examples of this in the past year, where people say things like,
“Whatever you think of them, they got you to talk about them, didn’t they?”
But think about 3 weeks later. Are you talking about them? Are you using their product? Buying their goods? Probably not. In fact, you may go out of your way to avoid all that they have to offer because the bad PR was way more significant than their lame product or service.
Sure, it brings a surge in traffic during the bad PR, but when the joke is over, as you imply, it is just a…joke.