[Guy Kawasaki at SVASE. Photo by Shel]SVASE
I spent a few hours over SVASE (Silicon Valley Association of StartUps) yesterday at the Microsoft Mt. View Campus. It was a professionally produced event, spotlighting promising startups in front of an audience comprised mostly of VCs. I saw five presentations from Boorah, DivinR , Jaxtr , kongregate and TelID . I saw reasons that each of these companies could succeed. It was a little difficult because they all had calibrated to present to venture people, meaning they had to drag out tired PowerPoint presentations and list team credentials, when each of them could have more easily plucked my magic twanger by emphasizing the beauties of their products and strategies rather than previous employers of team members. I wish a couple would hire me to coach them on presentation or better yet, just take note of the charismatic keynoters who preceded them, a guy named Kawasaki.
Kawasaki simply reeks of charisma. After his former employer, Steve Jobs he is consistently the most interesting and valuable speaker the tech community has yet to produce. He was there to talk about Truemors, his newest company. His talk was originally billed as, "How I Launched a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for only $10,918.09," but there must of been cost overrun. It was revised to $12,107.09.
His key point was that truemors went from site registration to live in just 7.5 weeks for $12K plus pocket change, as opposed to the usual $2 million and 6-12 months.
He told approximately 25o attendees the idea for Truemors was inspired by Hot or Not, a social media site started by two guys at a party who disagreed on whether a certain person of the female persuasion was or was not hot. They took her picture, sending emails to 40 friends. They asked them to vote on the hotness of the woman in the picture and invite friends to do the same. Overnight, 40,000 people voted.
Fascinated by the overnight success, Kawasaki set out to create a business on a minimalist strategy. He said he saved six months by not writing a business plan and not parading up and down Sand Hill Road pitching investors.
He outsourced virtually everything. Kawasaki found Electric Pulp in South Dakota who designed and developed the online polling mechanism and then the site in a few weeks. His logo was designed by Logoworks, another online service for $400. He spent $1000 registering 55 domain names. He could have cut that in half, but he did not like the implicitly sexist GoDaddy Superbowl ad, so he used the more expensive Network Solutions where he already had an account. His biggest expense was $4800 in legal fees. He warned that if a company succeeds, cutting corners in this area can be a fatal mistake.
He stated with apparent pride that his total marketing budget was zero and yet Truemors was flooded with 250,000 page views in its first day. Ah, but it seems to me, that Guy Kawasaki invested a great deal of time in marketing and the marketing got attention because of the significant currency of his personal brand. Kawasaki is a one-person marketing machine and if he charged his own company what he's worth an hour, it probably would be a cost equivalent to what a traditional PR agency would have charged to help with the launch. Kawasaki has better access to editors and bloggers than just about any PR practitioner and the launch of Truemors was a heavy media play.
The site has been praised by some but vilified by many more. He complained that he was criticized by some bloggers for allowing crap and hearsay to be posted and rebuked by others for removing crap and hearsay.
Still other bloggers point out Truemors has generated so much noise so far is because Kawasaki is the guy who's doing it. His retort: "That's obvious." He's right. I visited Truemors because it was Kawasaki's new thing. I decided to attend the SVASE event because I wanted to hear what he had to say about it. Hell, I made sure to put Kawasaki's name in my headline above because it might spike in my daily Google juice. We are all self-promoters, but it only works if you like what we are promoting.
In the end, Kawasaki's name will not sustain Truemors. In the end it needs to provide a product and/or service that is valued and sustainable by some sort of revenue model. So far, Truemors has not done so and the enhancement of Kawasaki's personal brand may have already faded. Webware's Rafe Needleman, showed me Truemors' Alexis graph, which looks much more like a Bell Curve than a hockey stick.
Kawasaki had four takeaways:
1. There is no such thing as bad PR. His point was that most bloggers had ripped his new company and generated huge traffic in doing so. He overlooked the fact that his own blog is the 14th favorite in the Western world and its a favorite of over 550 other bloggers. He also overlooked the fact that he is an experienced PR machine and one of the inventors of product evangelism as it is practiced in the technology community. Let a couple of brilliant computer scientists try doing what he has done and they will have a much greater likelihood to fall flat on their faces. While Arrington covered Kawasaki three times, without Kawasaki asking. Other startups grovel for the sort of coverage that Kawasaki can get on his own with little or no effort.
• 12 K goes long way. Absolutely true. Companies all over the world can use the efficiencies of the Internet to go further faster and cheaper than has ever been true. Kawasaki was followed by CEOs who all showed they were using classic approaches and conventional wisdom to raise money and go to market. There are new efficincies and disintermediating the money lenders and high marketing costs is a tactic that morecompanies should consider.
• Remote teams work. The relationships we build over the internet are not virtual, they are real. And we can share just about everything over the internet short of touch, taste and smell. Startups have an enormous opportunity to build global teams at low cost.
• Life is good for entrepreneurs these days. Kawasaki is a poster child for "Life is Good." But he is right. There are more opportunities today than at any time in my 28 years working as a tech consultant (4 years more than Kawasaki).
