The truth behind Truemors
"You can do a stupid thing for 12 grand. Life is good!" So says Guy Kawasaki, founder of the gossipy site Truemors, keynoting here at the Launch Silicon Valley event today. He's pitching his startup in a backhanded way, running down some numbers behind his launch. Here are a few of them:
Guy is fully buzzword-compliant
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)
- 0: Number of business plans written (editorial note: it shows)
- 0: Number of VC meetings taken
- $0: Marketing budget
- $4,500: Total cost of software development (Electric Pulp)
- $399: Cost of logo design (Logoworks)
- $1,115: Cost of registering domains (55 in total)
- 1.5: Full-time employees
- 2: Number of days after launch that Truemors was labeled, "Worst Web site ever," by the Inquirer
- 246,210: Number of pageviews the day after
- 24: Years it took Kawasaki to get to the point where he felt he could launch a site based on not much more than his own name.
Guy Kawasaki: Marketing machine.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)Guy is utterly and completely unapologetic about the controversy that has swirled around Truemors, and the cheap way he launched it (and I mean that more than one way). "Life is good for entrepreneurs these days," Kawasaki says.
But is it? As Kawasaki notes, sites that get a lot of buzz one day can devolve into obscurity on day 2. So while you can launch a site for next to nothing, as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
See the Launch Silicon Valley livestream, courtesy Bub.blicio.us.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
