This post might bite me in the ass one day, but what the hell right?
Running your own start-up is not easy. In fact, its insanely frustrating for many reasons. Try telling ‘regular’ people your idea over and over and for it to just go straight over their heads. Either that or they’ll instantly think its crap because they don’t understand it. Then they’ll wonder, “seriously, what do you REALLY do for work?” You get to the point of asking yourself: “Why bother even mentioning it?”.
Worse yet, try pitching your start-up and/or idea to a tech blog. I recently sent an email to a tech blog explaining what FantasySP does and why its a neat place to go for fantasy sports fanatics. It really works and it really provides an incredibly useful service. I even provided my Google Analytics stats. The response? “Nice, just trying to think of an angle…“. An angle? Are you kidding me? The angle is that it’s a bootstrapped profitable start-up with loads of cool features.
He doesn’t give a shit that the business is profitable with me working on it 20 hrs a week. He doesn’t give a shit that I’ve coded a product that people use, to the tune of 700,000 pageviews in September. Or that I’ve managed to keep costs under $300 per month and make approximately 10X that in revenue. Or that my start-up outperforms some that have 10+ employees with over a million dollars in funding. Or that I’ve done it all myself with no prior experience of the business world. I can go on and on, but none of that matters.
But this is my fault for foolishly not knowing.
What matters is that my start-up needs an angle that they find interesting. It doesn’t matter if your startup even does what it claims to do or if your profitable. If I pitched some shitty idea revolving an iPad app and daily deals with facebook integration I bet they’d be at least following up my email with questions. Why? Because its on-the-surface buzzword bullshit that attracts them to write and bring in the pageviews.
If you want your product mentioned, then modesty is not going to work. You have to play their game by overvaluing your product. Make outrageous claims like its the next Twitter meets Groupon. Lets look at a start-up like Color. I mean, why the hell did anyone even write about that shithole of an idea to begin with? Because Color is a product of arrogant bullshit from people who have been successfull before, and it will outweigh any logical thought or reasoning as to if it might work.
Everything about startup culture is complete bullshit. People would rather believe and write about pompous arrogant assholes who lie through their teeth about their product. I bet half the time, the things written in articles are BARELY half-truths. Why else would all of these start-ups go belly up within a few months?
I give people in the start-up world too much credit (which, if you knew me, is actually pretty remarkable). People only skip across the surface, and I just have to face the facts and move along. I’m no longer focusing on getting an investor on board, or trying to be mentioned in a tech blog, or trying to be acquired. If these things happen, great, but I’m not about to waste my time when I could be improving my existing product.
or Google 
, iPhone 
.