frankly speaking

Bringing (Un)Sexy Back

When a lot of people start their business, they do it for the wrong reasons - they do it for the parties, they do it for the women (or men), they do it for the press, they do it for the stock and they do it for the money. They go out of their way to try and get a weekly mention by Mike Arrington or a tweet from Sarah Lacy. This can be an effective strategy but it’s not always a winning strategy.

When I opened up the SF office of my current company, there was no new office party where we invited top name reporters hoping that they might drop a mention in their twitter feed or check in to our party on foursquare. Even though our company was founded by a guy who is very well known to a lot of people and backed by a top tier venture capitalist and a premier private equity company, you don’t consistently see us in the headlines.

Our business isn’t sexy - we don’t gamify, pivot or provide platforms for other companies to make money. But we’re good at what we do and we provide a product that serves a lot of people well. We’re not number 1 in our industry (yet) but we are very competitive. We don’t hit a lot of homeruns, but we hit solid doubles and triples. We put points on the board.

The reality is, for all the Mark-Z’s and Dennis Crowley’s in the world, there are hundreds of Joe Businessmans, people whose businesses will never see the front page of TechCrunch or the back page of the New York Times. When you start a company, focus on a the product, market the product well (and efficiently) and everything else will take care of itself.