Truemors: Guy Kawasaki’s useless website that comes with a $12,000 price tag
There’s some chatter going on with regards to Guy Kawasaki’s latest web venture, Truemors, a “rumor reporting site. Users text, email or call in a rumor and other users vote on it. Popular rumors make it to the home page.” (from from TechCrunch) and how Guy mentions that it (only) costs him $12,000 for the entire website to go from an idea to reality.
There’s already been quite a bit of criticism about this, most recently from Mathew Ingram, who’s post is entitled “Kawasaki: How I wasted $12,107 on Truemors“. In my opinion, he’s pretty much gotten it spot on; I agree that Truemors is a pretty pointless endeavor, once you look past the fact that it’s founded by Guy. (The multiple TechCrunch posts increased the site’s exposure to me, more than anything else. Those gave it way more hype than it deserved.)
To most people, this sounds like a glowing success story of a web startup, but to be honest, there are certain levels of web startups. There’s the kind where you need to launch it with several partnerships with major corporations before you can even get off the ground (a la Joost) and then there’s the kind where all you really need is a credit card in order to get something up and going. In the case of Truemors, we’re in the latter category.
The way I see it, someone like Guy could spend $12,000 on a web startup such as this because he can afford it more than most other people who are still in their college dorms and want to birth a startup of their own soon (like me!). Also, he’s gotten more flak for making this post than other people would get obviously because of his popularity.
There are many more posts out there that are just like this, which make claims that seem amazing to the blog author but which are unspectacular to those who are more savvy, which is precisely why we need to continue spreading the word on the wonders of open source software!
Popularity: 24% [?]
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It’s another case where people focus on the price but not the value. Take away the celebrity name and the “web2.0 site” would never have gained any traction. Perhaps had the bill been higher he would have thought longer about the service he was providing, some times costs are a good thing as they make you actually plan a strategy! Having said that, at least he didn’t launch with a superbowl ad featuring a sock puppet
You know, I can’t fault Guy on this. Not only is he solving a problem social people have — helping them with small-talk at parties so they seem knowledgeable and interesting — but he’s doing exactly what entrepreneurs are supposed to do — testing new ideas in the market. Maybe Truemors will fail, but, when the cost is only $12k, it’s reasonable to try an idea that probably will!
To me, the mistake here may be making the site available to the Internet at large, instead of, say, the members of his local Toastmasters chapter. I wouldn’t trust the Digg approach to filter the rumors for truth, considering how few people actually read articles on Slashdot.
It’s funny because it seems like he is trying to imitate digg’s success, yet (IIRC) digg was built for 1/5th of what truemors was.
Paul,
Very true. Although, cost has absolutely no correlation with success, which I know you already know.
Weird, I was just reading an article about that site yesterday.
David,
Where’d you read it? For a site like this, I’m not surprised that it would be mentioned outside of web 2.0 circles because it has more of a general appeal than sites like Digg. Entertainment sites have a far wider reach than tech sites.
Guy defended his spending $4,000 in legal fees today in a follow-up post. He says that the trademark, terms of use, etc. were why he needed legal fees. The problem is that those things do not add value to a site if the community is not there.
I checked the site again today, and the entries have improved a lot in quality. Hopefully it will go well for him, I’m sure he could use the money :).
Btw. Gary, is the post subscriptions thing you are using a plugin, or is it built into WordPress? It does a great job of bringing me back to the site constantly.
I read about it on the creator’s blog. I don’t remember where I found the link though. Possibly Digg.
David, it probably was Digg.
Paul, I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘post subscription’?
Paul, also I don’t get what kind of moderation Truemors is supposed to have. On Digg, articles are shown on the homepage only if they have reached a certain threshold; this isn’t the case on Truemors, so people can submit whatever they want. I just submitted something to test with, and it was displayed on the homepage immediately. That’s just silly!
Gary King: Indeed, he is a bit naive to allow anyone to post things to the homepage.
By post subscriptions I meant to say comment subscriptions; I mean the emails that I receive when someone comments on a post I have commented on.
Paul, it’s this plugin: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/