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 David Aronchick
The old marketing saw says you waste 50% of your marketing, you just do not know which half. Such a loss of efficiency makes my skin crawl, but in this case I have to agree. Anyone who thinks there is a single tool or technique other than being out there every hour of every day with your message is going to be sorely disappointed. For the new entrepreneur, it can be very alluring to see the famous blogerati, and hope that you can get the mention that will vault you to victory. But is trying to win that write up worth all the effort?
In the past few weeks, there have been a few cases that illustrate the spectrum of benefits (or lack thereof) of going after the famous. To call out some specifics:
- Quora – I cannot think of a single site recently that has gotten so many high profile people to jump onboard so quickly. They have managed to pull together the greatest set of contributors in the world, giving not the opportunity to them to bring people to the platform, but a chance for them to genuinely contribute to the conversation.
- Cinchcast – Full disclosure, Cinchcast offers some competitive products to Hark. Robert Scoble, Marshall Kirkpatrick and quite a few other very significant technology writers use Cinchcast all the time – yet it has not resulted in any significant traffic or attention.
- DoDont.com – Talk about a big bet, a founder of the site paraded in front of TechCrunch HQ for a couple of days trying to get a mention. A founder should be doing just about anything else but this, the likelihood of a payoff here is near zero. And even though they got a huge mention, I would be that that traffic is nearly all gone now. It is possible to consider this a win, but I doubt it will actually matter at all to their eventual success.
I can tell you from personal experience the famous can be a nice win – we have had plenty of spikes over the years (the Dane Cook tweets were particularly interesting), but the huge spike almost never sticks around. So is it worth it? By and large, the answer is no. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you have an MVP (and then some)?
- Can you iterate extremely quickly if you get great feedback?
- Do you genuinely believe the only reason people haven’t flocked to your product is because they haven’t heard about it?
Unless you know in your heart of hearts the answer is yes, going after influentials is not going to be your solution. Even if you are a perfect fit, the benefit that these influentials will provide is only short lived; you have to immediately leverage each mention or use of your products to a broader population or it will be like it never happened. Remember, these influentials are going to be onto the new hotness in the blink of an eye; you will only have a moment to take advantage of it.
The fact is, for the vast majority of businesses, there is no easy way to become broadly known. We all want consumer startups that get us the cover of Time magazine, but that is nearly always a total waste of time. In fact, the most valuable thing you can do is not try to get known by everyone, but get known by a super small set of folks – the people who influence the people who will pay you. Because as much as we want to solve the hard problem of getting known by having a single famous person be your champion, they simply cannot guarantee your success.
