Jun 4, 2007 01:07 PM
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TIM FAULKNER — Guy Kawasaki, former Mac evangelist, venture capitalist, and startupper, defends his new site, Truemors, "by the numbers." We are supposed to take from "the numbers" that Guy was just trying to learn some lessons about Web 2.0 startups, but Truemors does not reveal new lessons, it shows Guy needing to rationalize bad PR, something he hasn't faced so acutely before. Counterpoint to some of Guy's "numbers" after the jump.
5 catch phrases. The 5 buzzworthy phrases of the industry are: Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, and Social Media. Their use may yield some sympathy within the community.
0 Business Plans. If you don't write it down, it doesn't count.
0 VC Pitches. 0 VCs turned down funding the nonexistent business plan.
$12,107.09. The amount a 53 year old Venture Capitalist with no programming skills can charge on his credit charge to create a web site that teenagers are creating during study period. (37% development, 40% legal, 3% design, 9% domain registration, 10% undisclosed?)
55 domain names. Because even if its a casual experiment that you don't take seriously, the idea may take off in Cameroon.
1.5 Employees. Presumably, Kawasaki's "love" counts as half an employee.
3 Techcrunch posts. Truemors got 2 more Techcrunch posts than every other startup in the industry; it also received 2 more negative posts than most startups covered by TechCrunch.
261,214 Page Views. Digg, TechMeme, TechCrunch, and much of the tech blogosphere only drove 261,214 page views?
24 years of schmoozing. 24 years of priceless image creation and promotion does not count as a cost or marketing.
218/405. A great batting average; a horrible spam to "legitimate" truemor post ratio.
3 hours to be hacked. Hackers are more "impressive" than the developers who cost $4,500 and took 7.5 weeks to develop your site.
$120.04. The amount of monthly revenue from Yahoo that Truemors lost in less than 2 days.
15,004. The decline in page views after 2 days (a little more than 5%). Thank God for bad PR because without a bad review from The Inquirer, the number of page views would have been 0.
5. 5 lessons learned:
1. "There's no such thing as bad PR" is a lesson when you've never had bad PR before; for everyone else it is a cliché.
2. You get what you pay for, another cliché.
3. It's easy to cast blame at low cost developers "thousand of miles away."
4. "Life is good" when you can live off of an image serendipitously crafted 24 years ago.
5. There is little evidence that Guy has built a business for $12,107.09. He has shown the value of his name and his abilities as an evangelist to continually self-promote himself.
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Republished from http://valleywag.gawker.com
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