The Better the Press, The Harder the Pivot

The best startup advice I’ve gotten but didn’t listen to soon enough was from Sean Parker.  He warned: Be careful about doing too much press too early, because the product will pivot, the model will change.

Sean was right. Perceptions are far harder to change than early stage tech products.

We launched Udorse in “private alpha” at the awesomeness that is TechCrunch50. While I was busy doing CNBC * and MSNBC and WSJ interviews in the warm and fuzzy aftermath of the conference, I was not talking to alpha users or iterating or whiteboarding with my teammates Trevor and Jon on how to reshape the product. While I was being wined and dined by VCs at Madera I was not working on wireframes or doing usability testing or obsessing over minimum viable product feature sets.

Turns out,  our initial model was sub-optimal and our alpha product needed a lot of work before it could be considered "minimum viable".

No biggie, and par for the course for a startup less than four months old founded by three dudes who’ve never done this before. And Udorse is pivoting. Big time.

Luckily, our burn rate is a lot lower than our energy level. But I am worried that all the press we got early on [before we even knew what we were really building] will, among a certain set, “lock in” perceptions of our company/product that are false [namely, that we have anything in common with "sponsored tweet" companies like adly and izea, which we do not].

When we ship our next iteration in a few weeks, I hope the strength of the product alone will be enough to evolve perceptions. Because I don’t plan on doing another press junket until our product has the traction to back it up. Press is like like crack… However, I would love for @scobleizer to stop by our office next time he is in NYC :-)

I have a sense of déjà vu as I see other new and very early stage startups get caught up in a wave of media attention, e.g Ad.Ly.  I hope their current model works and that they have a product that offers real, sustainable, defensible value to a meaningful number of real people, since ‘get acquired fast by Twitter’ is imho not a sound exit strategy for them. And no, Kim Kardashian does not count as a real person.

*Don't get me wrong, the folks at CNBC are awesome -- especially Darren Rovell  -- and we are totally grateful for them covering Udorse. It's just that they covered a company that is now morphing into a meaningfully evolved company. And the coverage -- as fun as it was -- will make the morph harder.