

Kevin Rose: How to Take Your Site from One to One Million Users - tdedecko
http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/9-ways-to-take-your-site-from-one-to-one-million-users/

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Maciek416
It's worth noting that Kevin himself didn't use these tricks to go from "one
to one million", and already had many fans and lots of momentum by the time
Digg was launched. He was already a celebrity of sorts and even used his later
appearances on the Screensavers show to plug Digg.

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sachinag
Honestly, this makes no sense. It doesn't matter how famous you are - if your
product sucks, people won't use it. Look at Ashton Kutcher's Blah Girls. It's
a miserable failure - even though he's much, much, much more famous than a
mere Kevin Rose - because no one really needed to see cartoon girls do a weak
TMZ imitation.

I think people like to chalk up Digg's success to Kevin's "celebrity", where
in reality, he's a nobody and Digg actually is a really, really good product
for the niche it's serving.

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bastian
I think one not necessarily has to do with the other. In this example Kevin
simply used his existing network for the launch of Digg. I agree with you that
Digg is a great product for the niche it is serving. That's why it is
successful. Pownce on the other hand wasn't a good product and had limited
success despite Kevin's efforts to push it.

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mikeryan
I actually thought Pownce was an interesting product I'm actually kind of
surprised it never took off, except it was too "Twitter-like" so it never got
the network it needed to gain critical mass.

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teej
Pownce's failure had very little to do with it being "Twitter-like". It failed
because it didn't solve a problem that real people had.

Launching a product that is similar to popular incumbents isn't a negative
feature. In many cases, it can help your unique selling point. Mint: Quicken
but online and great UI. Hacker News: Digg for startups. Digg: Slashdot by the
people.

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RyanMcGreal
>Pownce's failure had very little to do with it being "Twitter-like". It
failed because it didn't solve a problem that real people had.

What problem does Twitter solve? (Not a rhetorical question)

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unalone
It gives them a way to quickly communicate feelings, and to see what other
people are saying quickly. Because it's so short, you can follow a lot of news
without being overwhelmed.

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sjs
Async communication is key to twitter. It's also cool that you can tweet by
any method anyone has ever thought of, from almost any device that can send
any sort of data whatsoever. The API has helped them greatly. I'm sure that
someone, somewhere has a computer that transcribes short voice messages that
can be left by phone. If not they will by the time I hit "reply" ... there
should be a rule #34 for twitter.

* e-mail

* sms (key for reaching mobile people w/o smartphones)

* web browsers

* native apps / widgets

And then services like twitpic built around twitter.

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rosebud
Finally, an insider's explanation for how Leah Culver got so "famous":

#1. Ego

    
    
       1. Ask yourself: Does this feature increase the users self-worth or stoke the ego?

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vaksel
if it's this simple, why didn't Pownce take off? Hell they even had access to
all of digg's power, and still had to shut down.

the reason digg took off was that he was more or less the first in that niche,
and he had the power of his tv celebrity to drive that initial amount of early
adopter traffic

~~~
pclark
getting the users and getting them to keep coming back are different
challenges

~~~
axod
Did Pownce do either of those things?

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barredo
I guess it did. Remember Pownce was very popular back in 2007 and they added
more features than Twitter had at that time.

The matter was people didn't wanna write thing twice, one in twitter and one
in pownce, and since twitter had more users than Pownce (don't know how many
more), it "won the race".

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bastian
Kevin is a great Entrepreneur but it strikes me that we have heard this a
million times before. There is some value for someone who is either very young
and/or very inexperienced.

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jlees
When listening to this talk I did have a moment of 'wtf' on the "Start a
podcast" part. It's clearly a big part of Kevin's success - the whole rockstar
celebrity diggnation thing.

But how good are podcasts _now_? Any startups finding them effective? Or am I
just biased because I have no attention span to listen to them, so
automatically discount them?

How about online video? Back when digg was young, podcasts were the thing; is
video today's equivalent, or is it just 'being interesting on Twitter'?

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lurkinggrue
Start with a good idea and get lucky?

