Pownce, TrueMors and Why People are Your Most Valuable Commodity Online

Both Guy Kawasaki and Kevin Rose are established personalities with a following. Kawasaki is known for his early marketing work with Apple, books on entrepreneurship/venture capitalism and recently, his widely read personal blog.

Rose on the other hand, is known as the founder of Digg.com, the largest social voting website on the web. Both Kawasaki and Rose each recently started a Web 2.0-style online social website.

In May 2007, Kawasaki founded TrueMors, a rumor reporting website and Rose (along with some friends) created Pownce, a mashup file sharing and social networking startup just a week ago.

Both of these websites received a large amount of publicity, largely because these startups were intricably connected with Kawasaki and Rose’s personal brand or should we say, aura.

Both of these websites were heavily populated from the onset: TrueMors recieved 261, 214 pageviews on the first day. Pownce is currently in an invite-only beta and has very quickly amassed a large group of users. A 5 day old post on Mashable about Pownce invites has already seen almost 8,000 comments left by interested users.

People are Your Most Valuable Commodity

These two startups got big really fast and most bloggers reacted to the ubiquitous media coverage of both websites by doing what they thought was relevant at the time: They blogged. They reviewed, criticized or praised them. They told other people about the websites. They also linked and referred curious visitors.

Search engines didn’t do any heavy lifting during the launch period for both startups. People did. Some of them with influence (like Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington) and some who are simply caught up in the general buzz or interest generated by others.

Pownce and Truemors were built on the backbone of an interested community. Some of these people were skeptical of each website’s features and purpose (as many were with Truemors) and others were genuinely enthused with the idea of a startup being backed up someone they respected or were familiar with.

As Kawasaki elaborated in his experiences with TrueMors’s startup process:

I spend $0 on marketing to launch Truemors…However, I did spend 24 years of schmoozing and “paying it forward” to get to the point where I could spend $0 to launch a company.

Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”

Kawasaki and Rose leveraged their audience and network of relationships. They built a reputation that automatically sold any online project associated with their personal brand.


People are Your Best Marketers and Brand Evangelists

Affiliate marketers understand very well the value of interested users and they often spend a lot of effort in building and maintaining a large list of email subscribers. The main reason is that the people on their email list are both potential customers and advocates of their personal brand.

The easiest way to make sure your projects are successful is to focus on building an audience that trusts you. Startups and online projects of any sort can either flop or become a huge success. As we’ve seen in Pownce and TrueMors, having a core audience just makes it easier to kick-start the entire process.

There’s absolutely no need to market your website by spending money, when everyone else is already doing it for you.

Learn to Take a People-Centred Monetization Strategy

Here is a principle that is rather important to understand: People are portable. If you own a social network, blog or online community, you should be maintaining or expanding it with the view that you are building a large catalog of people who can provide recommendations or contributions to your future projects.

Take the example of a forum. It’s easy to monetize a forum once you receive a decent amount of traffic and a large amount of registered members. However, let’s pause now to take a look at what you have in your hands.

Your forum members are essentially a group of advocates and marketers, each of them willing to back your future projects, if they find you or your website to be invaluable. You should be familiar with the crowd you are building around your site. Holding off excessive monetization in favor of developing more user oriented features will add value to your audience.

This is the same with a blog. Will your readers trust you enough to follow and support your future online projects? Or are they still wary of you because of how you always seem to be trying to make money from their every visit to your blog.

Pushing affiliate programs in every blog post you write makes you lose credibility. People don’t want to be sold and pitched in every article. Squeezing content into a pulp by strategically inserting large Adsense units at every chance you get is a short term monetization strategy that limits your potential.

Instead, make your audience portable by building trust towards your site or personal brand. You are much more likely to receive greater monetary returns in the future when you are able to easily leverage the recommendations and support of a core group of people for all your entrepreneurial schemes.