Not Just an Experiment: Guy Kawasaki's Alltop.com

It's not an experiment, it's not a demonstration site, it's just a commercial web property designed to provide something useful, gain readership and make some money. Guy Kawasaki's two new Web companies, Truemors.com and Alltop.com, represent a new direction not just for Guy Kawasaki, but for the entire community of Web entrepreneurs. Guy talks about how the Web has changed, and how it's a lot cheaper today to start a Web company than it used to be.

You have two dotcom companies, Truemors and Alltop, which have attracted some attention, not just for their content but because of the way they were launched and funded, or in this case, not funded. What's the premise of the two sites?

People are trying to make it into this grand entrepreneurial experiment that I'm trying to prove that in the Web 2.0 world you can do things for ten or fifteen thousand bucks, it's actually not true. It happens that I have done it for that amount, but they're not experiments per se. I'm really trying to make money. People have this expectation; it's a double edged sword. If anybody else had done this it wouldn't have gotten the publicity. On the other hand, that's kind of an unfair advantage. People are looking at it and saying, "He did this only because it's a good experiment", but really, I'm trying to make money. I was inspired by Hot or Not, and PlentyofFish, Fark, and sites like that, and so why not?

Being an icon isn't all it's cracked up to be.

No, sometimes you're a trash can.

There are a lot of news aggregation sites out there, how is Alltop different from all the other ones?

The fundamental premise is that there is a vast majority of people who do not know or will never know and don't care about figuring out RSS feeds. And so what we're trying to do is create a site that is pre-done according to scores of topics. We have about 45 right now. And what we're trying to do is make it so that someone who just wants to follow the environment or politics or gaming or gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender, they don't have to figure all this out, it's already done for them. We like to position it as an online magazine rack. Now for any given single topic there may have been a site that aggregated sites about that topic, that is true.

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