Foldera: 1 Million SignUps in 12 Days
I spent six great hours with Richard Lusk and Oliver Starr from Foldera today, helping Richard get ready for his talk at eTech next week. I'm willing to bet that the few dollars I'm charging them for a few presentation rehearsal sessions is nearly 100% of the money they have spent on marketing.
The product has not yet gone live. They have retained no PR agency. I do not believe they have ever been mentioned in by a traditional media organization. Yet they have one million registrations in the 12 days since it was announced that they exist and have a way to make it much, much easier to manage all your projects. From what I can make out, no startup has had this big a response in this little time span. Not Napster. Not Skype. Not my beloved Riya. Not anyone.
The way this happened is not disputable. A few bloggers wrote about them--not a lot. A few, like Mike Arrington are influential in Web 2.0 circles. The registrations are coming from all sizes of business, from less to 10 employees to Global 100 companies, from one seat to hundreds.
All because of a few bloggers. What do these numbers really mean? Only a few dozen people on earth have ever seen the product, and it is still being tweaked. But some of these people are bloggers and this is a very big confirmation of this little theory I keep playing with:
If you are a Web 2.0 startup, and you have good technology, you don't need a PR agency anymore, at least not before your first launch.
What's in Foldera's plans for future marketing? They plan to start a company blog.
Shel, what matters is that those 1M sign on still use the service after 7 days !!
Techies normally just sign up, play around get the look and feel of a product and then walk away.. unless there is "stickiness" to a product will it pay off.
Posted by: /pd | February 28, 2006 at 05:28 PM
Id like that many signups.
Posted by: Peter Elphick | October 21, 2007 at 07:38 AM