April 01, 2008, 2:55 PM — 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?
