Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Sasha Pasulka
Your audience is your friend. You need an audience to build a company or a website, to pull off a great event, and to create buzz around your brand. I use the word “audience” because it’s broad – it can be your customers, your readers, your evangelists, your attendees, your advisors or your investors.
Your audience should always include haters.
“Haters” is also a broad word. I’ll be clear on this, though – when I talk about haters, I’m not talking about people who come to you with constructive criticism or valid complaints. This feedback is crucial to building a successful company, and, more often than not, constructive criticism comes from people who genuinely want to be helpful (or at least they want to help you help them).
Haters are the people who just want to trash talk, who want to tell you how much you suck or your product sucks or your event sucks in a fashion that couldn’t possibly be construed as constructive. Haters are angry and unhappy and, I’d wager, generally insecure, and haters like to take that out on other people. The anonymity of the Internet makes it exceptionally easy for them to do this without repercussion.
Haters just gonna hate.
And that’s a great sign.
When your product or your event or your website is relatively new, and feedback in the past has been either positive, neutral or constructively critical, it can be jarring when the straight haterade starts popping up.
“Who is this person,” you wonder. “Is my product really the most worthless thing since Crystal Pepsi? Are there actually monkeys who could do my job better? Should I really give my kids to Child Protective Services so they don’t have to be raised by someone so utterly incompetent? Come to think of it, I liked Crystal Pepsi. Wait — where can I hire those monkeys?”
Any run-of-the-mill rapper can tell you what I’m about to tell you: As soon as you have straight-up haters, you’re doing something right.
First of all, the advent of the haters means you’re reaching an audience beyond your family and friends, beyond the people who were excited to be beta testers or supportive of a new company. Haters are a solid sign that you’ve gone mainstream, that you’ve achieved a level of success worth bashing. For a hater, it’s hard to get the desired ego boost from belittling someone or something insignificant or unsuccessful. Haters hate on the people achieving things that they haven’t. It almost never has anything to do with you, except as an indicator that you’ve succeeded at something.
I’ve been giving this advice to up-and-coming writers for years now – bloggers I coach and mentor who call me, panicked, when the first hateful and cruel comments show up.
“Congratulations,” I tell them. “You’re officially a big deal.”
So if and when it happens for you – and I hope it does – reread that email about how you should probably just give up and go live in a cave somewhere because society would be better off without you, then hit delete. (Please resist the urge to respond, regardless of how phenomenally witty you plan to be in doing so.)
Congratulations. You’re officially a big deal.
