evansolomon

Traffic is a double-edged sword. Certainly a lot more important than funding or headcount in many if not most cases. But it's also a lot less verifiable than funding or headcount.

Quantcast is a good start, though certainly not perfect and requires opt in from the company. Then there's the whole mess of Comscore, Compete, Google Analytics, etc. Ask 5 companies to measure one site's traffic and you'll get 10 answers.

My point wasn't that there aren't other tools to measure success, but that blaming the press for funding and headcount being emphasized is silly.

Edit: There's no shortage of traffic data in the press either.

Do you know a lot of private companies that publicly share their revenue or profit? Of the ones that do, how many do it in a way that can be verified?

What is the best metric the press could use for measuring private companies' success? Money raised and number employees might be bad, but I'm not sure they're not also the best ones possible.

I don't believe you don't take into account who makes something in judging it, at least initially. Few things are impressive on day 1, either because they actually aren't that impressive or because it often takes more than 1 day to understand an impressive thing. Who makes something is a good way to understand the thing faster, and I don't think that's the least bit unreasonable.

It sounds like this would not detect someone using Firesheep and also tunneling their traffic through SSH or a VPN, right?

It's interesting that you chose to show Skype as a good home page. I happened to visit it today because I had to install Skype on a new computer. They make you jump through a lot of hoops to download the software and I actually pointed it out to a coworker.

Any thoughts on that?

Not saying you lie about honoring them (I can personally say you never have lied to me about it), just that a public "we don't honor embargoes" stance isn't always a valid indictment.

Jason, to be fair so did TechCrunch but you still honor embargoes often. Glass houses, ya know.

Like anything, it depends. I'd rather not say too much about SG's pricing publicly (since I don't work there and don't speak for them) but it's similar to other agencies in the same market. Ballpark, that means 10k-30k depending on your company's reputation, the scope of work, which people from the agency are on your team and compensation structure.

You don't really pay a whole lot more for higher quality agencies (I could go into theories on why but will save that for another post). Companies almost never hire bad agencies because they can't afford good ones. Far more often it's because they don't know how to find (or identify) the good ones or because the good ones don't want to work with them (it's a big risk to an agency's reputation to take on a bad client).

If anyone wants to email me I'd be happy to go into more detail privately. If you have any general PR questions that aren't agency-specific (hiring agencies, hiring consultants, how PR can be successful, etc), I'd be happy to answer those publicly.

Edit: In case anyone is curious, other YC companies SG has worked with are Xobni (I worked on this account), Scribd (I worked on this account too), Loopt, Zumodrive and maybe others I'm forgetting.

I used to work at SutherlandGold and would be happy to make an intro for any companies that are interested in talking with them. Email in profile.

(In case anyone is curious, I have absolutely 0 financial stake in the business so I will not make a dollar wether you hire them or not, just offering to help if anyone is interested)

There actually are several aspects of being a poker player (online) that make it really hard, though surely not impossible, to live a normal life. You have very little interaction with other people, your working hours are partially out of your control, and it is incredibly stressful/tiring. I know a few people who managed to combine poker with a normal life, but I know way more who utterly failed.

Sincerely, A guy who used to do this

This is a small point, but funding doesn't get announced on the day it closes ever. So no one was signing anything related to this deal once the .ly stuff started happening.

Whether or not TechCrunch is reasonable about pointing out when they're wrong doesn't seem relevant. Facebook "attacking" their post has nothing to do with what TechCrunch might do if it turns out the post was wrong.

Facebook knows if the post was wrong, they're not "attacking" anything to make a point in case it turns out to be wrong.

Links to the rest of the series of articles here: http://linkbun.ch/0bf9s

Here's a clip of Gabriel's portion on Justin.tv http://www.justin.tv/evansolomon/b/268557010

They launched Wave in May of 2009. It's not like they yanked it all that quickly.

No more than you could point to "Seniors Jeopardy," "GED Jeopardy" or "Aspiring Actor Jeopardy" in the TV Guide. Choosing to focus on a particular demographic doesn't, and shouldn't, compel you to focus on any others.

That doesn't make sense in the context of maxklein's comment. He said that the same people get covered over and over because they have a better human interest angle. If the human interest piece were being <30 years old, that would only work once/year when Inc does this feature.

Being "successful" isn't necessarily the point, and I don't think it needs to be. If the goal were to write about the most successful companies, there would probably never be a startup mentioned--and it would probably be an article you had no interest in reading. "Google, still huge. Exxon, yup they make a ton of money. Etc etc."

You are likely correct that it's unlikely any of these companies' futures will change appreciably because of this coverage. However, PR can definitely make a real difference in a business--see Aaron Patzer's thoughts on this (no particular source, but he talks about it a lot). To take your airline example, Virgin America invested a ton in PR when they launched.

Also, I think writing off successful PR (even in this particular article) as being a company with or without a human interest angle is wrong. I don't think there's anything particularly human interest-y about Posterous, or syncing cell phone data to computers. Certainly the fundamentals of the businesses are not the high order bit either, but that doesn't seem any more like any inherently good decision basis than many other things.

"If he's providing real value, it's fairly simple to start paying for advertising and driving new customers to sign up etc."

This is definitely not fairly simple. Getting the attention of potential users is a huge problem and a difficult, valuable one to solve. This is to say nothing of what the founder of VWO should be doing, but whatever the answer is it shouldn't be because getting customers is fairly simple. It's super hard.

"Most reporters are not going to do days of research to find the companies"

A journalist's goal is to communicate (usually new) information, not necessarily to write about harder to find, harder to describe stories. I don't think this is a question of low hanging fruit, but one of form factor and audience.

From a company's point of view, especially a startup, communicating a message that is both beneficial to you and interesting to others is damn hard work. To take your VWO example, and the context that it came up in last week with Optimizely, I think there is a lot more than having or not having a "hook." The people at YC do an awesome job of prepping new startups for their first press coverage, often on TechCrunch. There is the obvious benefit--that the company is funded by YC--but also the non-obvious benefit that the company is drawing on lots of experience in successfully getting good press coverage and avoiding mistakes that others make.

"[A less descriptive name] flies in the face of traditional, accepted marketing and branding theory"

By pretty much any metric, this is demonstrably wrong. Here's BusinessWeek's Top 100 Brands list: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/07/top_brands/source/1....

How many of those are descriptive names?

I would be surprised if Wikipedia was, on average, more accurate than the NY Times. You'd have to account for what's knowable in some way, and the timing of what was published.

"I like my news to at least try to be non-biased"

In theory this makes logical sense, less bias being preferable to more. In practice, for me, this is like asking for your food to be mostly non-poisonous or for your security system to work most of the time. That is to say, you're probably best served, in order, by having none of these things, then 100% of these things, then everything else.

Have you considered doing more marketing? Seems like you are in a spot where it would make sense.

This is a popular idea lately, that web apps can (and should!) do everything that native apps do. Are there any examples of that people actually use regularly? I know I have tried a few of these 'apps-in-a-browser' and even the ones that worked reasonably well were still clunky enough that it always felt like a worse version of something else, to the point that I stopped using them quickly.

Our basic operating idea at the company is that if people think something makes it harder to get their job done then it's a problem worth fixing. Professionalism in the office is just one example.

I submitted page 2 by accident, here is page 1 http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100701/the-way-i-work-justin-k...

Thanks for mentioning us (Justin.tv)!