In numbers

Guy Kawasaki : how I made a social media site, Web 2.0, with user-generated information that attracts people by spending $ 12,107.09.

From the experience gained with Truemors , I learned a lot about business in the Web 2.0 era. Here is a brief overview of my path:


From the site description: Truemors is a website with which you can tell the whole world what you want (within the limits of good taste and law, of course). Publish rumors, news, observations, while everyone can know your news and evaluate them in minutes. (The name of the site comes from the merging of true + rumors, true + rumors, "true rumors", approx. Lane.)
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1. 0 I wrote 0 business plans for this. The plan is simple: to create a website in a few months, to understand whether people liked it, sell advertising and sponsorship (or not to sell).

2. 0 I attracted 0 venture capitalists to finance a startup. It is easy to live when you can create a company with debts on your own credit card.

3. 7.5 7.5 weeks have passed since I registered the domain truemors.com for the site that settled on it. Life is also great when there is open source and Word Press.

4. $ 4,500 . The total cost of the developed software was $ 4,500. The guys from Electric Pulp did the work. To be honest, I did not believe in remote commands puffing over the release of the product, but the work of Electric Pulp persuaded me.

5. $ 4,824.14 $ 4,824.14. The total cost of legal servants was $ 4,824 14. I could use my uncle and terminate the contract with a lawyer, thereby saving a few bucks, but it would be a short-sighted approach if Truemors did become something.

6. $ 399 I paid LogoWorks $ 399 to create a logo. Of course, that was before HP bought the company. Not sure that I would pay the same now. :-)

7. $ 1,115.05 I spent $ 1,115.05 for domain registration. I could use GoDaddy and make it much cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy for that.

8. 55 I have registered 55 domains (for example, truemors.net, .de, .biz, truemours, etc., etc.). I was absolutely not aware that you need to buy so many domains surrounding the one that you are going to use. Yes, I could register and spend less, but who thinks about saving hundreds of dollars when you can lose huge sums on legal fights with cybersquatters, if Truemors is successful?

9. $ 12,107 09 In sum, I spent $ 12,107.09 to launch Truemors. At the time of the dotcoms, entrepreneurs had to spend five million dollars to test stupid ideas. Today I proved that in order to test stupid ideas you need to spend $ 12,107.09.

10. 1.5 Frames: 1.5 full-time workloads at Truemors. For me, this is more sporting interest than work.

11. 3 TechCrunch wrote about Truemors 3 times: information leakage, information leakage with a screenshot and site opening. I might like to tell you that I am so insidious that I planned it. But Michael Arrington thought he would annoy me like that. Do not stop, Michael!

12. 261,214 To my amazement, on the first day we scored 261,214 page views.

13. 14.052 To my amazement, on the first day we gathered 14,052 visitors.

14. $ 0 To start Truemors, I spent $ 0 on marketing.

15. 24 At the same time, I spent 24 years on reasoning ( Schmoozing ) and investing in the future in order to understand how I can spend $ 0 to start a company. Many bloggers conjure: "The only reason Truemors got so much is that this is Guy's project." My usual answer to this is: “You have understood the obvious clearly.”

16. 405 Since some people have absolutely nothing to do, we received 405 posts on the first day.

17. 218 We deleted 218 of 405 posts because they were junk, spam, inappropriate, or just plain stupid. What is most interesting, half of the bloggers complained that the site was full of spam. The other half at the same time swore that I delete the posts. :-)

18. 3 Some 3 hours after opening the site was hacked and we had to temporarily close it. I was impressed. The hacker who did this must be the new Woz . Please contact me if this is true.

19. 36 Some 36 hours after opening Yahoo! Small Business told us that we are not suitable for this service due to the volume of our traffic.

20. $ 29.96 Our monthly breakeven point was $ 29.96 from Yahoo!

21. $ 150 Since Yahoo! evicted us, our monthly break-even point quadrupled to $ 150. If you are interested in buying monthly sponsorship for $ 151, you will make Truemors profitable. :-)

22. 2 Some 2 days have passed since the discovery, as Truemors was called “the worst website of all time” by Inquirer magazine.

23. 246,210 Praise the Lord for the Inquirer, since the result was a level of 24,610 page views on the same day. Yes, that's for sure - there is no such thing as bad PR.

24. 150 If you typed “truemors” at Google a week before the discovery, you would get 150 results.

25. 315,000 11 days after launch, “truemors” had 315,000 to issue to Google. I can not explain how this can be, but I do not mind.

26. 4 I received 4 lessons starting Truemors:

To draw the line: Truemors would be a successful project or not - I learned many things. Now I’m sure: no one will tell me that to implement a web startup you need a million dollars, four programmers and six months to start a company. With products such as WordPress , MySQL, and Salesforce , today web business is much cheaper and simpler.
For a little money and time, you can start something and estimate whether it will work. If will be, hurray! - The best time to make a profit - the time of growth of your startup. In fact, you may not even need to increase investments. For your information, there is no worse time to make a profit than the time when you have nothing but an idea. In fact, there is an even worse moment: when you spent the first million and did not achieve any opportunities for its return.
I will end with the well-known truth: There is only one way to understand whether your idea is successful: to realize this idea. So do it!

PS: We will always be happy if you join the ranks of the “ trumorists ”. Trumorists are guys with accounts on the site truemors.com. Everyone can publish information through voice mail, text notes, e-mail, but trumorists can create, edit, save and delete their topics (“trumores”). Also the topics of the trumorists are highlighted in green in order to distinguish them from the posts of non-trumorists (interesting, but did they already have a post “I don’t trumor!”? Approx. Lane).


The date of publication of the original material is June 3, 2007. When reprinting the translation, please refer to the original blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/by_the_numbers_.html and the actual text.
The text translator will be grateful for comments, observations, corrections of possible inaccuracies and participation in the correction of the material. You can also discuss this material and ask questions to the author on the blog of Guy Kawasaki.
Information from the following sources was used in the topic: blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/by_the_numbers_.html