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There were some sour grapes out there in the blogosphere. People are saying,
you could do this just because you're Guy Kawasaki. Is that true, or could someone
even without a reputation, but still with some skills and insight, do the same
thing and create a company like this with a small amount of money?
To be fair, the prices were slightly lower for me because lots of people owed
me favors. So my legal work was done for less money than if someone just walked
off the street into Wilson
Sonsini, and said "do this". The programmers and outsource developers
did it for me for less because of the same kind of reason. But the order of
magnitude is, maybe instead of $15,000 it would have been, let's be really high,
let's say $50,000. Still, $50,000 is a long way from $2 million. So as far as
the sour grapes, well, I think one of the keys to an entrepreneurship effort
is not that it's a level playing field, but you tilt the field toward you as
much as possible. So what was I supposed to do? Not use all of my friendships?
At the end of the day, you either fail or succeed. It's not about succeeding
by playing fair. That came out wrong, because I'm not saying you should be dishonest,
I'm saying you should use every advantage.
Sure, every entrepreneur book in the world talks about the first thing you
do is use your connections, and if you don't have any, go make some.
A lot of people say, "You wouldn't have gotten the attention if it
weren't for you", and that is true. There's no question. On the other hand,
I would not have gotten the heat. Two guys in a garage who were just trying
this wouldn't have gotten all the publicity, but they also wouldn't be saying,
"What a joke for Guy to be doing this". And I can also tell you that
generally in the blogosphere if they hate something it doesn't mean you'll fail,
and if they love something it doesn't mean that you'll succeed. It just means
that that the million or so TechCrunch readers think that. To put it mildly,
TechCrunch is not …
They're not ordinary people.
They're not representative of the rest of the world.
A lot of the criticism of Alltop revolved around the fact that when you read
the TechCrunch blog and all the comments, they're all talking about Alltop isn't
full of all these geeky whiz-bang technology features that people that comment
on that blog are used to. But actually that may be Alltop's salvation, and key
to success in the end, that it doesn't have that.
Actually the million or so people who read TechCrunch are the least likely
to use Alltop.com. And so it would be as if there was a community of one million
race drivers online, and you announced a Toyota Camry hybrid. And they all said
"well, this is a lousy car. Zero to 60 in eight seconds, I need four seconds.
And why do I need a back seat? I'll be racing. In fact, why do I need two seats?
And there's not a very good roll cage in case I get into an accident. And it
takes a long time to change the tires during a pit stop." Well guess what,
the Toyota Camry hybrid wasn't designed for you. Now when your mom calls and
says, "I need a car to drive around and I'm tired of paying four bucks
a gallon for gas", the race driver might tell his mom to buy a Camry. The
race driver is not going to tell her to go buy the new Ferrari 360 Modena. And
they can't get past that. They can only judge it in their own eyes. Truly, the
intended user for Alltop is probably the TechCrunch reader's mother or father
or kids. But it's not for them. I'd like to see one of those TechCrunch people
say, "okay, my mom called, and she said she wants to follow fashion news.
So I told her to go get Google Reader and then type in 'fashion news' into Google,
go to all the sites, look for the little orange button, click on that, click
on XML, import it into a folder, and then use Google Reader." I'd like
to see that. As opposed to what? Go to fashion.alltop.com.
For somebody wanting to start a successful web site, is it a mistake to ignore
the audience of ordinary Joe's out there and focus just on what the geeks in
the blogosphere are saying?
It depends on the product, right? If you're creating the ultimate Flash
tool, the TechCrunch community is very important to you. But if you're creating
a tool for the other 99.9 percent of the world, I could make the case that if
the TechCrunch crowd hates you, you're doing the right thing. Having said that,
I still want to be on TechCrunch because we've only heard from 200 angry people.
Who knows what the other million readers think, and maybe they are telling their
parents to use it and their kids to use it and their spouses to use it.
It's a little counter to conventional advice entrepreneurs may get from
elsewhere. You're always told to look for the next great piece of revolutionary
technology, for something new and innovative that nobody else has ever done
before. On the other hand it may be just as wise to just look for the obvious,
something that's useful for a lot of people but is not rocket science, or even
anything new. Is there wisdom in that approach?
Yeah, at the end of the day I think, if you seriously thought about it, most
highly successful companies aren't exactly the ones that are winning Nobel prizes.
There is something revolutionary about Alltop in that it is such a stark interface
and it does so much stuff in advance for people. Now it doesn't have this super-duper
technology, there's no Ph.D. behind it. But from an end user perspective, who's
been struggling to find stuff on the internet, it is revolutionary for them.
So I guess the key is not to win Nobel prizes, but to have something that lots
of people use. In that sense, does eBay have anything that's going to win a
Nobel prize? I don't think so.
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