July 11, 2006

The discussion topic was “Viral Marketing”.

(Others took notes, and will enter them)

From Steve Lacey: As a few people have asked me for it, here’s the blog post regarding equity levels: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/03/nine_questions_.html for people coming on board.

Gaurav’s notes from the meeting.

* 0.03% of readers do 60% of diggs * commenting on digg articles can cause diggs to happen

* viral marketing as biz-marketing e.g. halo 2 * viral by nature

• myspace you add friends
• flickr you’re tied in, friends don’t want to leave comments on a new site

* user evangelism

* do you need a community?

• no need some way to encourage people to come

* create example stuff on the site

• for BillMonk create a bill for fun

* 53000 tech-crunch meme

• while true, it does reach tech gate keepers who spread the word

* plaxo’s story

• seeded it with the top businessmen VCs
• if you get an email from one of them, you will respond

* marketing yourself

• public speaking
• goto all tech events
• write code
• leave lots of blogging comments
• blog to raise awareness
• share your code with academia

* journalists

• once you get a connect make friends
• find out what they want

* launching sites & features

• create press release before hand?
• send to various journalists & bloggers?
• hype before the launch?
• launch quietly

* marketing your site

• specific market: seed it with the top 100 people
• build in viral component
• create a badge for another site
• don’t every pay someone to like your service, they’ll actually stop using it
• tie into a big group
• leave comments on blogs which write about you
• build web services

* gettting dugg

• email a lot of your friends
• pick something that is widely interesting

* handling customers

• when you screw up: respond quickly, apologize first, include details on the fix
• some customers are too expensive to deal with, it’s worth losing them

* internationalization

• do translations
• do first translations to german because the strings are longer
• utf8 everywhere

* outsourcing

• odesk, great site
• quality of work not good
• mostly black box return, nobody looks at quality of code
• india is good for timezone and language
• desktop snapshots every hour!
• hourly rate

* students

• interns will work for credit for free
• art from college students for free, they put it in their portfolios

* how much to give someone who is brought onboard to a prototype level product

• 2-3% at a late stage
• guy kawasaki wrote something about it