After the Techcrunch Bump

I see many consumer Internet pitches these days where the basic marketing strategy is to (1) get covered by Techcrunch, (2) get tens of thousands of users from the “Techcrunch Bump”, and then (3) “grow virally”.  While a positive Techcrunch review has the potential to send thousands of consumers your way, it does not represent a marketing plan.  Munjal Shah at Riya found this out after the launch of Riya back in 2006, when he wrote about “the cocaine like high and subsequent crash of the Techcrunch effect”:

The Techcrunch article got put on Digg and read in thousands of feed readers and viola… the Techcrunch effect begins. Michael’s blog is the single more effective vehicle to get the word to the online blogosphere about new technology companies on the planet..The unfortunate fact was that the initial hammering [our servers] took was just not the reality we would see later. The number of photos uploaded per hour began to fall and then stabilized near the end of the 22nd at around 25,000 photos per hour and would continue to fall for weeks to come. – Munjal Shah

So while a positive reception from the blogging community is valuable — and can generate a lot of initial activity/interest and a nice looking Alexa chart — it is not the only ingredient in your ultimate marketing success.  When I see a post-launch consumer Internet startup, I basically look for a few simple things:

1)  Usage Growth — how many unique users are visiting/engaging with your site and product, and how is the rate of growth evolving over a several week period of time.  I also look at the source of this growth — is it scalable, repeatable and systemic?  Is it event-driven (ie, PR)?  Is it organic or driven by marketing (ie, is the company buying growth via Adwords, etc)?

2)  Virality — So many people misunderstand virality.  Virality is not “word of mouth”.  And having a product go viral is not easy — nor is it something you can just “sprinkle on a product” after creating it.

This post discusses how to look at customer numbers to get a better feel for how the growth is actually going. Interesting read.