Fred Wilson On Startups | Hacker News Reader

Fred Wilson On Startups

alltopstartups.com

Fred doesn't appear to have written the article, it's just cobbled together.

The fact that it's submitted by a user named after the site, who submits only their own content, correlates strongly with being low quality. (I realize people submit their own stuff. I do it to. But not EVERYTHING I emit.)

Low quality content is the new spam.

I am not able to appreciate the contradictory statements here in the blog:

# Do not hire a PR firm to do your free marketing for you. This is a core capability you must own. You can and may want to hire a PR firm to supplement your efforts, but that’s a different story.

# Marketing is for companies who have sucky products. If you build something that is amazing (think Flipboard or Instagram or Instapaper) people will adopt it because it is amazing."

I think it is absolutely necessary to market what you build and that is the general advice from most gurus. Anybody has different thoughts to correct my perception?

(It's a series of quotes taken out of context)

He means literal marketing by buying users. Amazing things carry a lot of the marketing weight directly.

Good thing Zynga, his most successful portfolio company didn't listen to his advice. Much of their initial growth came from buying users. Only later is the origin myth of "we built something cool and it just went viral" put into place.

first, you should read the post where this quote was taken from [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/marketing.html]. i specifically addressed the zynga situation.

second, zynga didn't start by buying users. they got their first 10mm users (or something like that) from free distribution on the facebook platform before facebook starting clamping down on that

Thanks, that post provides a bit more context.

I guess the debate is basically "At what point do you start spending on customer acquisition?".

The early days of any platform are a somewhat unique perfect storm of opportunity. Much like the launch of the App Store, that was a unique, transformative event that Zynga capitalized on. I don't think it's fair to extrapolate from that to an axiom.

I think it's a matter of different perspectives, and maybe a little confirmation bias. As a VC, by definition you're seeing startups that already have some traction, very possibly without having done any marketing, and are looking for growth capital. This is not the case for the vast majority of startups.

If an early stage startup needs to pivot and iterate in response to what users want, then it makes sense to get your product in front of users as quickly as possible. The quickest, most reliable way to do that is to to spend a little money on traffic to test your assumptions and get initial metrics of conversion rate, LTV, etc.

Not tweeting to the same early adopters that will try any new startup and move on to the next thing on Techcrunch a few minutes later.

"how did you start a company before Twitter?" seems like a pretty ridiculous question for anyone to ask. It's pretty easy to empirically demonstrate that the "I'll build something, tweet about it, and then it will go viral" plan fails 99.9% of the time.

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