I got a bad review from TechCrunch, lessons learned | Hacker News Reader

I got a bad review from TechCrunch, lessons learned

joshliu.co

91 pointsximeng43 comments

All tech entrepreneurs are hoping to get coverage from TechCrunch. It is the best way to get early adopters, early traction and recognition. It gives you a sense of pride as well. Once your start-up is covered by TechCrunch, you feel you are finally a proper tech entrepreneur.

Can I suggest caring less? You can take external validation from many places. Users are a good option: they pay money, care about the space, are less jaded, and are friends with people like themselves.

TC is not a good place to recruit early users, unless you are building an app for poor geeks with short attention spans. If you are, you have bigger problems.

I'd say, the review was actually good for Josh, as it gave him very honest feedback, probably much more frank than what he heard from people in person. People tend to say either "great, keep on going" or are very negative about a product, without being specific. It's easy to ignore the negative comments and write them off as 'hating'. I would venture that TC is an authoritative source, and therefore he took a hard look at what maybe needs to change.

Another point Steve Blank talks about this in Stanford series of talks on customer development: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2060 [video]

He mentions any type of PR, Press including TechCrunch coverage shouldn't be sought after before contact with the customers and is part of a strategy and not a random tactic. And this is typically after you figure out what business you are in, who your customers are and how do you scale demand for the company (Product Market Fit).

A lot of the valuable lessons and negative comments that Josh took in that early TechCrunch post could have been gathered and learnt in a non-public fashion during customer discovery and development.

Absolutely, good point. It's hard to resist the urge, though - seeking coverage (to get confirmation or otherwise) is only natural when you are passionate about your start up and want to tell the world what you are doing.

Customer development is still massively undervalued, though.

Customer development is very much like the screening of a unreleased movie. A studio will get a nearly finished product in front of movie-goers before releasing it using that feedback to tighten plot points, editing, etc. The difference with a web-based product and a movie is that continually feedback loop never ends for the web-based product.

> All tech entrepreneurs are hoping to get coverage from TechCrunch. It is the best way to get early adopters, early traction and recognition. It gives you a sense of pride as well. Once your start-up is covered by TechCrunch, you feel you are finally a proper tech entrepreneur.

Rubbish.

Get users, get revenue. Ignore bad reviews/haters.

First thing, TechCrunch isn't the be-all-end-all of tech sites. Number two, Mike Butcher's self proclaimed description of himself is "Butcher by name, Butcher by nature"

It's a real shame that a lot of people think TechCrunch is the place you need to go to "Make It"

So you got a bad review, pfff

My only advice would be, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try, try, try again.

While that may be true, let's be real...being featured on TechCrunch is a step in the right direction. Some press is better than no press, etc. If you get on one tech site, you have a higher chance of getting on others, which means more traffic, which means more users for customer development.

Is it the difference between making it and not making it? Probably not, but it can't hurt.

Yeah, it always astonishes me how destroyed people can feel about a negative tech crunch mention.

If your consumer base is not the sort of tech geek who reads TC then TC frankly doesn't matter if you want to sell your product.

I really liked your site, however while browsing a couple of things struck me as odd:

1. The yellow "we're in beta" alertbar. The alertbar usually tells you that the website is trying to do something fishy you don't want it to, like popups.

2. The inconsistent menubar. On the front page, if I just want to check out your site without signing up, there isn't one. When I click "Browse MinuteBox" a menubar shows up, but it disappears when I click "Profile" and forces me to hit the back button instead of going to another page.

On another note, I know you're beta and everything, but I see no requests. Which means I can't really check out what that (the most important) side of your site is about. I don't know what you could do about it besides making fake requests, but I can't really see what your site is about at the moment.

Hi there,

Sorry, we are waiting for Paypal's approval of using their new API, Paypal X. Therefore, we are now only recruiting experts to join us. That is why there's no requests there just yet. Once we are ready to go, we will push it and let people to post requests and arrange sessions.

Cheers

Josh

Maybe new to to you, but X came out in 2009.

nono, X verifies start-ups who are using them. We cannot use them without their approval. We have submitted the application. Once we get that from them, we can then make our site live.

You are relying a great deal on paypal approving you. I hope you have a backup plan.

Their Pre-authorised payment and parallel payment fit our model perfectly. Our CTO knows them pretty well. We think it is the best option for our initial stage. Once we scale, we will look for more payment options.

Is it realy a good idea to lure in experts to find an empty page? I took the time to register and so on to take a look, but only to find empty listings, now i will most likely forget the site and never come back.

sorry, I put the note at the end of my post. We have not launched our website yet and that is why the site is empty. I was just sharing a post in my personal blog and did not really expect great responses like this.

At least that’s the theory. In reality I think this site has about a snowflake’s chance in the white hot cauldron of a collapsing star, and it’ll probably be overwhelmed by porn merchants faster than you can say “charge for online video.” Assuming they find it.

I don't remember reviews on TechCrunch being this harsh. Wow.

There's constructive criticism. And then there's this.

What's wrong with being overwhelmed by porn merchants?

The stock photography on your FAQ has to go. Asap. In fact, the picture of the lady in the call center was recently used on a blog that makes fun of bad stock photography.

I think call center stock photography is probably one of the worst things you can put on a site.

Thanks for the comment. Will pass that to our designer.

Thanks for all the comments.

Yes, I agreed that TechCrunch is not the place or only place to get validation. Probably it helps you to get the attentions from echo chambers. But, users are the real judge to decide if you are building a solid business or not.

I liked your lessons learned, but you should add a lesson 5:

/etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 techcrunch.com

Honestly, fuck them. It's a blog with dubious editorial standards anyway.

Focus on finding users, marketing, generating revenue, etc. If you're worried about TC then you're wasting energy that could be used elsewhere. Once you get a few paying users, find a PR firm to issue a release that can be forwarded to smaller blogs and new outlets.

Nice to see someone forging ahead instead of throwing in the towel and saying they failed fast. A startup is a long series of ups and downs, and bad reviews will be part of that.

Hi guys,

Thanks a lot for your feedback and comments. Am thrilled with all the response. I will be very happy if the post is useful to you guys.

Josh

TC especially europe is nothing to stress, it hasn't got many people watching it anyone, looks at alexa for traffic reviews. You'll get better feedback on HN

Totally agree, TC Europe seems to be lacking any real support from the TechCrunch brand.

There's a TC Europe? (I'm from Europe and I didn't notice.)

It looks more like UK TC and there's even a France TC ! I think nobody know about them.

[edit] Well not only UK, first page just happened to be very UK oriented but if you read further there is a bit more diversity.

Hmm, it's sad. We need a stronger start-up/tech entrepreneur scene in Europe. Everything is so valley centric :(

I feel bad for the OP ... that was definitely a harsh review. That said, I notice that he called this a "Minimum Viable Product," which is a term of art from the Lean Startup methodology.

That very same methodology says you're not supposed to have some big TechCrunch launch with that MVP ... precisely because it is almost certainly not ready for primetime. The point of the MVP is to get it in front of real customers, learn, and iterate.

Taking concepts, decontextualizing them down to buzzwords, and then acting on them is a path to fail.

Totally agreed that it was one of my mistakes. It was wrong to get TC review so early. Another lesson learned. :)

Awesome writeup, by the way, thanks for posting this!

TechCrunch Article: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2008/05/20/minutebox-does-not-box-c...

Congratulations-- you did a nice job of deriving some useful lessons from this experience. And, as you no doubt realize, none of the lessons have anything to do with TechCrunch at all, but are things all start-ups should always be keeping in mind.

"We cannot learn real patience and tolerance from a guru or a friend. They can be practiced only when we come in contact with someone who creates unpleasant experiences. [...]" Dailai Lama ;)

There is no such thing as bad publicity, as someone once said. Now, that's not strictly true in general - but for a startup a bad piece of press does at least get your product/service out there. It also gives you a great opportunity to show that you listen to feedback by iterating on your offering. Fix the things people don't like and then put up a blog post saying: "Hey, we fixed it!"

I don't care what they say about me, just make sure they spell my name right! - PT Barnum

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:P._T._Barnum

Thanks for writing this up—usually being TechCrunched is a very positive thing for a startup, but sometimes it's not.

I'd actually say that it was, in the long run, a positive experience. You improved your product. The negative press probably brought in a lot of users. And now you're in a better position.

Good on you. Keep working at it.

OP here. Just to be clear, I'm not Josh, just saw this in his twitter feed and thought it would be of interest to HN.

Thanks for documenting this process. I appreciate the opportunity to learn from your experiences.

PS- I love the homepage video, did you outsource that? If so where? Design is also very good.

> No, journalists will probably not do that.

What do journalists do anyway? I mean there has to be a reason why they call themselves 'journalists' and not just 'bloggers'.

I always assumed journalism would somehow include a little bit of research but ... nada. From my experience with the online "press" I just can assume that all those online journalist do not deserve that label.

Whenever I'm preparing a press kit I feel like I would be doing all the journalist's work and they only need (and most presumably will) take my copy 1:1, smack some Adsense on and republish it.

I have not much experience with print media so I don't know if the print journalists, too, are such a lazy bunch but online it's ridiculous.

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