

Crush Notifier backlash: if Dan Lowenherz is a crook so is your favorite company - jarin
http://jarinheit.posterous.com/the-crush-notifier-backlash-if-dan-lowenherz

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jazzychad
Don't let it get to you, Dan. The day I launched Notifo, I got instant
backlash on TC, HN, Quora (back in private beta days; had to beg for invite to
defend my honor) and even IM. It caught me off guard, but eventually I noticed
it happens to everyone.

New and unique ideas are the hardest to gain traction because nobody
understands them yet. Improved executions of existing ideas can gain traction
a lot faster. There is hardly one version of anything out there... and if
there is, there is something wrong about it.

Haters gonna hate.

~~~
ramanujan
> It caught me off guard, but eventually I noticed it happens to everyone.

EXACTLY. What no one ever tells you is that as an entrepreneur one of two
things will be true:

1\. 100% of people will ignore you

2\. OR, some nontrivial fraction of commenters, journalists, bloggers (often
10-20%) will _HATE_ you

It helps a lot to know that this happens to everyone.

~~~
patio11
One more vote for "everyone gets this", and I do mean _everyone_. BCC received
the following comment on July 17th, 2006:

 _Am I the only one who is a little annoyed?

Patrick, you spend 8 days, budget $60, spend most of your time blogging about
what you did, and you call yourself a MicroISV? It's more like NanoISV to me.
A real MicroISV pour a lot more energy and soul into the software they
develop.

If somehow, your blog gets popular and what you did is considered a
"MicroISV", I will be very sad. There will be no more pride in being a
MicroISV and I will stop calling myself that. Spend a few days, a few bucks,
to get a few extra bucks is a MicroISV ? Shame on you man! You give those real
MicroISV like Bob Walsh and few others a bad name!_

I should really get that framed.

~~~
bvi
I _love_ comments like this, because if you truly believe in yourself (and
your product), it will only spur you even more to prove everyone else wrong.

~~~
ahoyhere
Totally. Do it. Living well is the best revenge and haters are universal, so
there's lots of opportunity to get the best revenge ;)

My parents, circa 1999 when I was dropping out of high school to teach myself:
"You'll end up working at 7-11!"

(Our income from products this year will be 10x my father's salary from that
year.)

~~~
kirubakaran
What they most likely meant was: "This increases the probability that you may
have to support yourself working at 7-11".

~~~
ahoyhere
Naw. What they REALLY meant was, "We're adult children who are afraid of life,
afraid to take risks, and because we don't bother to know who you really are,
daughter, we're going to project our brokenness on you and destroy your dreams
like other people destroyed ours."

------
reason
Don't worry about it, Dan.

Here's something I've noticed in the years I've been on HN: Many seem to be so
utterly pessimistic about others' ideas, executions, and successes out of what
I suspect to be nothing but pure jealousy. Seriously. Take a look at every
Rate My Startup thread, every thread about a company being acquired, etc, and
you'll find people left and right throwing criticism after unwarranted
criticism.

The difference between you and most of the people on the thread about you
releasing your new product is this: You're actually creating stuff, and I'm
willing to bet that a good 80% of them are not.

If Crush Notifier doesn't work, it seems like you'll quickly jump onto the
next thing; so keep pushing, and don't mind the disgruntled, cynical, vain
naysayers here on HN or TC, etc.

------
acangiano
Assuming that the comments are even real, they show a naive and fundamental
lack of understanding of how marketing is a tough skill to master on its own.

Even if you were to be handed the keys to a perfect replica of Facebook, with
a whole new brand, it would be anything but trivial to gain traction with it.

Success is above all determined by the execution of the idea as well as its
marketing.

Some of the commenters are no doubt annoyed by the fact that the idea was (in
their eyes) easy to execute and TC did most of the marketing for them. So I
think it comes down to petty jealousy for some.

~~~
bermanoid
_Success is above all determined by the execution of the idea as well as its
marketing._

And even with brilliant execution and a fantastic marketing strategy, most
things are _still_ doomed to fail. Luck still plays a brutal and major part -
the internet is chock full of successful startups/sites/projects that lingered
in obscurity for many months or years without catching on, and then suddenly
blew up and started to go viral without any particularly clever action on the
part of the founders.

The important thing is to resist the urge to explain success and failure as if
they are deterministic when they're really driven by essentially random
factors (to be precise: they're _not_ random, but they're so unpredictable and
difficult to control that to us they might as well be). The "execution is
everything" mantra is true for most types of products, and poor execution
_can_ explain failure, but IMO it's far overrated for things that rely on
virality. Even if you do absolutely everything right, there's always a
significant chance that an inferior me-too ripoff is going to be the one that
gets all "your" users.

Which is why it's so much smarter to build things like Breakup/Crush Notifier
as weekend projects rather than startups.

------
dot
Your posting pictures of techcrunch comments. I'd qualify them somewhere
between Youtube comments and yahoo answers.

~~~
TillE
Indeed. Though I find it remarkable that a tech/startup blog has managed to
cultivate such a ferociously stupid group of commenters. You expect that on
the general internet - YouTube, news sites, TMZ, etc - but even Gizmodo has
half-decent comments.

Who benefits from such garbage? I'd love to know if anyone here has experience
maintaining loose communities like that. Does light moderation help? I feel
like letting the loudmouth morons run free tends to shut out anyone who might
want to write something intelligent or useful. A crappy comment section is
worse than useless; it actively makes your site look bad.

~~~
Vivtek
I think it's too late for moderation there. If you moderate, sometimes with a
heavy hand, right from the start, you can build a good community (Making
Light, Metafilter) - but once you have a community that isn't good, you
essentially have to reboot it entirely by shutting off comments for a while,
then starting over with draconian moderation (BoingBoing).

I still don't know how HN happened. I suppose making it a private community to
start, then opening up once the culture was established, played a large part,
and I know pg does some moderation. But I personally haven't seen much
evidence of moderation, so my mental model is a little soft there.

------
maukdaddy
This is why I have a policy of NEVER reading comments on mainstream sites.
Almost 100% of the time comments are atrocious, or worse.

Even sites like NYT have morons and it only goes downhill from there.

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siddhant
The backlash just doesn't make any sense. Its just a weekend project getting
TechCrunched, and hence getting a lot of traffic. The fact that there were
similar services existing beforehand, is really irrelevant.

Sometimes the internet looks like a _really_ strange place.

------
smoody
I think people are mostly upset because he got coverage on Techcrunch and,
IMHO, that idea isn't Techcrunch-worthy (whatever _that_ means).

~~~
ricefield
Haha, I feel for Techcrunch. No matter what they write, seems like the vocal
majority deems is TC-unworthy

~~~
lachyg
I really think it's time for TechCrunch to turn comments off.

~~~
salemh
the comments are definitely adding to my complete disinterest in TechCrunch in
general (especially post AOL acquisition) re: quality (though the comments
were typically always abhorrent).

Quality discussion of articles is many times (like ycombinator) more relevant,
salient and informative.

------
Tichy
There are zillions of crush apps already. It is a nice idea, but to accuse
anybody who implements it of stealing the idea is ridiculous.

------
Miller450
If people read Dan's blog post <http://blog.crushnotifier.com>, they'd realize
what a good and down to earth guy this his. Honestly, I think he's an
inspiration to put oneself out there and give your projects a shot. It's one
thing to not like a product. It's totally another to bash and write hateful
comments like those on TC. That doesn't encourage other young entrepreneurs to
take risks and try products out, which could be a horrible side effect. The
best will always rise above it as I think Dan is doing.

------
iamclovin
It's like TechCrunch has been infected with Winklevi.

------
ricefield
Glad someone already said everything I wanted to write on the TC threads...
just another reason I like HN so much better than TC...

------
marknutter
Sour grapes, plain and simple. Nobody should get upset over an app that
literally took two days to build.

------
edge17
Worse than bad press is when no one's talking about it. Even if it's bad,
people talking about it means people care enough to do so!

engadget once called something I did outright 'crappy' right in the title of
the article. guess who was making sales? that's right, this guy :)

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ry0ohki
It's not he who has an idea first that wins, it's he that executes it best.

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dennisgorelik
There is no bad PR.

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aneth
I think it's a bit arbitrary and ridiculous that Dan is getting the kind of
attention he is for these projects given all the other products out there -
but that's the way mob mentality and yellow journalism a la Tech Crunch work,
so good for him for exploiting that.

Most entrepreneurs would kill for this kind of attention to their weekend
projects. Now everything he does is inherently newsworthy because he's "the
creator of Breakup Notifier."

The lesson here is - do something controversial and make a name for yourself.
Notoriety is far better than obscurity for an entrepreneur.

~~~
jarin
"The lesson here is - do something controversial and make a name for yourself.
Notoriety is far better than obscurity for an entrepreneur."

This lesson isn't anything new, it's been around since Diogenes.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope>

------
Charuru
No ill will vs Dan, but this is not like Steve Jobs taking an academic project
from Xerox and integrating it into his system. This is like Steve Jobs joining
Xerox and presenting the same system to the Xerox manager under a different
title.

There's nothing different btwn this and Zynga's cloneVille tactics which all
other game companies universally hate.

