Is Guy Kawasaki’s Backhand Better Than His Serve?
In tennis the best way to win points is through an ace. It’s fast and effective. The perfect first shot. Professional tennis players must be trying to hit an ace every time they do a first serve. But they don’t. In fact they rarely hit an ace. The best tennis players in the world hit what, 20 aces a game? And they’re serving hundreds of times. That’s not a great percentage.
But of course, it’s not meant to be. If hitting an ace was easy, everyone would do it. And the challenge and value of winning at tennis would be diminished because it would all be accomplished with quick, easy shots.
In tennis, like in entrepreneurship and business, it’s all about the follow-up.
Aces are great. Best way to win points. But it’s unrealistic to expect you’ll hit an ace every time. It’s what you do after you try and hit an ace - to win - that really makes the difference. A great shot on the baseline. A drop shot that no human could reach. An overhead smash and grunt to really drill home the point that you’ve won. It’s the follow-up.
When launching a product (especially a Web 2.0 one) it’s not about what you launch first, it’s what you launch second, third, fourth and fifth that matters. Of course, if you hit the ball into the net you’re in trouble, but you still get a second chance.
I didn’t find anything offensive or inaccurate in Guy Kawasaki’s post about how little it cost to launch Truemors. And there’s some interesting information there on how he spent the money (i.e. the legal bill surprised some.) You can launch businesses and Web products cheaply. It doesn’t work all the time and in all cases, but that’s not Guy’s point either. He picks a side to argue it, and generate buzz.
I don’t find Truemors particularly interesting or valuable except as an exercise in building something quickly and inexpensively. The content is mostly garbage, it’s uncategorized and largely unfiltered. I can get better, more authentic, and more trustworthy rumors - for my particular interests - in a slew of other places.
But Truemors will succeed or fail not on its opening launch, but on what it does next. And after that. And beyond that still. The buzz that Guy’s generated is awesome (kudos Guy!) but after the hoopla dies down you need people coming back; and they need real reasons to do so. Truemors is far from an ace, but there’s still time for a volley game and a backhand winner down the sideline.
Don’t be afraid of swinging for an ace. Swing for it every single time. But expect and plan your follow-up, because that’s where the game is won.
Good post Ben. You can’t approach business (or almost anything else for that matter) with a “build it an they will come” attitude. I’ve personally witnessed that approach on a particularly promising business only to watch it not crash and burn, but fizzle into a vegetative state.
I’m equally on the fence about Guy’s project. The product looks solid, but the content seems rather willy-nilly to me. Let’s see what Truemors will do net.
Speaking of Guy though, I thoroughly enjoyed his post regarding the figures. Posts like these are always as insightful as they are encouraging. Reminds me of the Figures Behind the Top Web Apps panel at SXSW:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_the_figures_behind_top_web_apps.php
12,107 Reasons that Outsourcing is a Bad Long-Term Strategy…
I’ve sometimes expressed frustration to friends and colleagues of mine that projects aren’t moving quickly enough because I’m waiting on some piece of development to be ready. Often, their response is, “why not just outsource it?†The famous …
I disagree (I’m sure that surprises you Ben).
The oft-quoted adage “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” is oft-quoted for a reason: it holds a lot of truth.
If a website turns me off on day 1, I’m unlikely to return.
I visited Truemors once, and learned my lesson. I won’t be back — and I suspect I’m not alone.
If you’re going to launch a product (anything, consumer good, book, Web 2.0), do it RIGHT from the beginning — why suggest half measures are fine, if you compensate for them later?
I can’t think of many examples of products of any kind that were duds on launch, but managed to take the world by storm on rev 2. Can you?
OK, Truemors isn’t a horrible idea, but I certainly expected more from Guy. I heard him give the Keynote at Webmasterworld and it was really the most fun I’ve ever had at a keynote speech
One last point, he made some terrible decisions regarding legal fees and domain name registration that increased costs for Truemors. The site should really only cost half of what spent MAX!
This is great advice, Ben. And I’m a little confused, because I think your advice shores up Mat’s point. You do only get one chance to make a first impression, so why waste all your first impressions on your serve? Because it’s always what you do next that wins or loses the game.
I prefer to roll out the launch of a new site slowly, in phases. Most first-time visitors to the site never see the first phase. By the time they visit the site, I’ve gotten lots of feedback from early users. I’ve refined the idea and the implementation. I’ve added other necessary features. I have plenty of time to deal with bandwidth and server usage issues. In other words, the return is more important than the serve.
-TimK
@tim
>> You do only get one chance to make a first impression, so why waste all your first impressions on your serve?
The crowds visiting your site at launch (i.e. your “serve” in this analogy) are going to be the influencers, the digerati, the people who will evangelize on your behalf. If you blow it with these folks, you’re liable to 1) destroy a lot of potential good will & free marketing and worse, 2) turn them against you.
The people that continue to trickle into your site over time, and who might find something vastly improved relative to the failure at launch are likely to be much less effective at helping you get the word out that you did it right this time ’round.
That’s why you don’t launch something half-baked. No one likes to be the laughing stock, and now GK (if he wasn’t already) has been made the laughing stock’s laughing stock.
Mat - I never said “half baked” was OK. I said, “Go for an ace each and every time.” BUT, as an entrepreneur you should realize that your first shot at it won’t be perfect. It might not even be great. But all is not lost.
First impressions are key. And you’re more critical than curious *grin* … I’ve visited Truemors a couple times out of curiosity to see what’s going on with it.
I thought about excluding Truemors from this post altogether - because truth be told, I didn’t need it to make my point - but I thought the heated debate over his post on what it cost to get Truemors running was worth commenting on.
For all the bashing of Truemors, it’s still generating buzz, and that’s generating traffic, and I bet that’s generating revenue.
As for products that were duds initially that took the world by storm on rev 2…I’m not sure. I can think of products that didn’t take the world by storm initially, but eventually did, rev 2 or not. Twitter, for example. *grin*
I don’t think it’s OK to say to Guy-wannabes: “Go for an ace every time” and then apologize for his ill-conceived concept and poor execution. We should just call a spade a spade. A crappy site should be labelled as such, rather than used as a shining lesson in launching a web product (or how not-to-launch a web product).
Regarding curiosity, I suppose you’re right; mine is satisfied rather quickly. There are lots of things out there to discover, so I need to be quick with my calls… lest I waste too much of my life on things like Twitter *double grin* (And btw, I’m still willing to double-down on the fact that Twitter is on a fast-boat to irrelevance).
Finally, I don’t buy the concept that generating buzz in and of itself is a good thing. There are many kinds of buzz and the kind surrounding Truemors is one of the few to be avoided.
Yeah, I also never said “half-baked.” Unless “half-baked” means “not in its final form.” A website should never be in its final form upon first launch. Because the most successful business (and website) owners are successful because they can adjust their plans (and sites) to account for what they learn while building their business.
Also, the Digerati are too busy to follow every site on the Internet. Even in a tiny niche, the influencers are too busy to care, until you have something actually worth showing. But if you know you don’t want them to jump on your Rev 1, then simple: Just don’t launch it. Put out Rev 1, and start driving traffic to the site, pre-launch. (Or in “alpha,” or whatever.) When you finally do officially “launch,” you’ll have enough users and content to establish the site, enough experience to give you confidence, and the ability to handle a large influx of new visitors.
But frankly, in most niches, this isn’t even a problem.
-TimK
Re: “mostly garbage.” I suppose this mathematically means that 50% of the postings are garbage. I would debate you on this. I guess it depends on what you define as garbage.
Is a truemor that Paris is released garbage because you don’t care about Paris? Or is it a “good truemor”? For that matter, is a truemor that Toyota just sold the millionth hybrid car “garbage” to Trixie the teenager?
To us, “garbage” is something that’s not a truemor: spam, blatant promotion, profanity, and the like. We delete those as soon as we see them.
So I’d like to know what you all consider “garbage” because there’s no way that 50% of the posts are spam, blatant, profanity, and the like.
Guy Kawasaki
Guy - Thanks for stopping by.
I should have taken a screenshot last night and this morning when I was writing the post. Many of the truemors listed looked like junk/spam.
I just checked the front page and it looks much “cleaner.” I didn’t click all the links, but I hovered over many, and they seem to go to legit sites.
Maybe it was a timing issue; not having the moderators online early in the morning (EDT) to clear out the junk?
Still, the utter chaos of it is overwhelming to me as any form of valuable information gathering. But this post wasn’t really a review of Truemors. Nor do I want my further comments to go into that either.
I thought the debate you stirred with your post on what Truemors cost was interesting. The legal fees stood out (but having just gone through financing I’m well aware of legal fees), and the domain name fees stood out. So that led to including Truemors in this post, to try and discuss the idea of follow through on product launches.
It probably was a timing issue. I went to be at 2:30 Pacific and got up at 8. Between that time, who knows what was there. We’re putting in some technology to prevent “garbage.”
How does the legal fees “stand out” if you just went thru financing so you’re “well aware” of what they can be?
55 domains for $1,100? Doesn’t seem like a lot of money to me. It’s infinitely easier to to buy a bunch of domains than to get squatters out. $1,100 would buy about 3 hours of legal work.
Guy
Guy — The legal fees stood out because I saw people questioning them. But having just gone through a financing round I looked at them and said, “Yes, I can understand legal fees like that.” Mine were higher (which won’t surprise you)…but I can see how many entrepreneurs doing startups would see your legal fees as high for Truemors.
The cost of the domains didn’t surprise me either. That you purchased so many did. I hadn’t thought about that, but it was interesting. One of those “makes you go hhhhm…” moments. And I agree, having to deal with squatters later is much worse than buying all the domains up front.
So basically we’re in agreement about almost everything!
Guy
Guy - Well, that depends…beyond what I wrote about Truemors specifically, what do you think about the rest of the post? And other posts on the blog? *grin*
With respect to Truemors itself, I’d say we’re not in full agreement, but then again I’m on the outside looking in and you’re right in the middle of it. So you know all the sneaky, ingenious, entertaining plans that Truemors has, and I’m waiting for them…
Mathematically speaking *smile* we’re probably around 75% in agreement. Maybe even closer if we weren’t posting on blogs to encourage debate, but meeting face-to-face instead.
Great observation Ben!
It’s about capitalizing on success. A lot of companies gain some initial success but they don’t capitalize on the momentum to keep the ball rolling.
Follow up (and having a plan to do so) is really important.
I see a “mark as spam/junk” button à la YouTube in Truemors’ near future :P.
Francis,
There’s a category already called “Crap.”
Guy
Ben,
75% agreement is good. It’s 74% more agreement than most bloggers right now.
Guy
Guy, how does a user flag an entry as “crap” though?
Francis,
You know, you’re right. We changed it so that the originator sets the category. It used to be that anyone could set it. Guess we will have to look at your flagging method!
Thanks!
Guy
Ben, do you mean follow-up or follow through? Generally opponents aren’t able to return an ace. So I guess I’m curious.
I had looked at Truemors only once before and it just didn’t catch my attention. I go back now, as I’m reading this post, and it still doesn’t do anything for me.
Guy, you should definitely follow-up with a redesign of that landing page. The site seems to just run together for me and makes everything hard to read. Maybe it’s the icons, the color, or the spacing, but it seems to hurt my eyes.
Maybe it’s the branding. “Rumors” is not a hot search term by any means. Is it possible that the name is fooling people? To me you’re trying to sell a VW Bug (you own a Ford dealership) to someone (a VW fanatic) that’s looking across the street at the VW dealership. With the right advertisement you can sell that Bug. The problem is they won’t come back to your lot when it’s time to buy their next VW.
hey Ben, thanks for your comment! Glad to see you guys are flesh and bones.
I didn’t really mean to say that you or Fred think you are movie stars or something - I was actually refering to the videoblog scene in general, like a lot of people on youtube and other vblog sites do.
I enjoy the idea on standout jobs (and the work you guys doing is great - doing different is always great!) - I (like some other people, I presume) just tend to get bored when searching information on ’streamed formats’ - like looking for specific things on a podcast, or having to watch some hours of videos to extract something. Anyway, I’m watching standoutjobs closely (hell, who knows my next job comes from your site, eh?) and wish you guys the best. Even if u don’t get an Oscar in the process
Robyn - I may have used follow-up and follow-through interchangeably. The message is for the person delivering the serve - go for the ace, but if you don’t get it, that’s OK, you still can follow-up (or follow-through) with a winner.
Hope that clears things up!
[…] Is Guy Kawasaki’s Backhand Better Than His Serve? by Ben Yoskovitz of Instigator Blog. Ben, who recently launched Standout Jobs, compares tennis, entrepreneurship and Guy Kawasaki’s recent launch of his Truemors web 2.0 site. Moral: follow-up matters in entrepreneurship and business. […]
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