Gatekeepers of the 21st century
Posted by Patrick on February 11th, 2006
Let’s say you have a really wonderful new software application that you have been working on for the past year and a half and is now ready to launch. As luck would have it you don?Äôt have the necessary money to get the service launched properly- you can?Äôt hire a big PR firm to sing the praises of your revolutionary new service or do any online advertising. What do you do? Well, you can do what I did and work 24/7 doing guerrilla marketing and send your business plan out to as many angel investors and VCs that you can find and hope that its enough. But the sad reality is that it probably isn?Äôt enough. After two years of developing software that would truly revolutionize a high value niche industry and doing everything that I possibly could to get the word out, I found myself absolutely broke with personal debt that is frightening.
The takeaway – it doesn?Äôt matter how good your idea/product/service is, if you don?Äôt have connections, you don?Äôt have shit.
So what does this have to do with blogging? A lot actually, as blogging has further eroded the traditional barriers to entry, but even with the best blogging practices, you still can’t guarantee that you will get your idea/product/service in front of the right people. It seems as though the key to success these days is to get a thought leader/uber blogger/gatekeeper of the 21st century on board pumping your story. In fact, the Wall Street Journal had a nice article on this topic in which the author questioned the ethics of having these uber bloggers creating buzz for companies in which they sit on the boards of directors, are business advisors and/or have a monetary stake in the success of these companies. Is there a conflict of interest? There could be, but these guys are no different than the gatekeepers of the past. The bottom line is that if you are in a position that can increase the likelihood of success for a start up then you should be compensated for your work. Just be upfront and honest¬? about it.
Interestingly enough, just one day after this article was published Stowe Boyd, one of the new gatekeepers, was blogging about a new service called 3bubbles. What is important here was that Stowe was upfront from the get go about his relationship with 3bubbles.
The technology is neat (full disclosure, again: I am consulting to the company, and as a member of the advisory board, I have a financial interest. Be warned: I am not unbiased! This is not an independent assessment! Floss daily!) which is what first attracted me to the company, along with the story of the founders. One, Drew Golkar, dropped out of college to pursue his 3bubbles dream, and another is Jeremie Miller, who is well known to me and others as the inventor of the Jabber protocol. Good DNA and cool juju.
By taking this route Stowe never puts his integrity into question. Model behavior indeed.
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