This is in no shape, form or fashion a commentary on VC blogger Guy Kawasaki’s latest venture Truemors and Jason Calacanis’ latest venture Mahalo.com.
I’m simply using the launch thereof - and the PR goodwill - both founders have to make a couple points:
1. Even when you can get people’s attention, keeping the hits coming is hard.
Yes, Alexa sucks, but you get the image:
As you can see, both sites have managed to pique people’s attention, but when the dust settles, I’m not sure either site has had much staying power.
Kawasaki’s site got a lot of negative press, but any PR is good PR, and he somewhat seems to have come out and thrown in the towel with regards to building an actual business, and is now trying to pass it off as a case study: By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09.
Mahalo definitely will cost more than $12,107.09.
Calacanis - whose nemesis Nick Denton seems to suggest is remorseful to have sold Weblogs Inc. too soon - raised $16M on a valuation of $100M. Madness I tell ya, madness. Side note: Denton and Calacanis are one another’s most effective publicists.
But the point is: while he will get the digerati and technorati excited, like he did today, I’m not sure about the long term staying power of Mahalo because of the reasons I outlined before.
I’m giving this one some thought, but Mahalo will either be relevant to 4% of the searching community who are early adopters etc. or it will be the exact opposite: relevant to the 96% that are not the savviest Web surfers but who’s neat and tidy results - albeit quickly out of date and potentially scammy - are comfortable and unintimidating.
Time will tell.
2. Hype is a double-edged sword
Aren’t you better off ironing out your kinks and then coming out when everything is rock and rolling? I don’t know, my personal experience says hype is not all that effective cause the wrong people are checking out your dirty laundy. Alexa sucks, yes, but the Alexa ranking suggests a high ranking for Mahalo, but other equally dubious sources like Quantcast suggest 6,000 unique users.
Alexa and Quantcast are both dubious in their own ways, but you get the idea: to justify the $100M valuation, Mahalo will have to please more people than the cool kids in the hall.
Any thoughts?
Apparently, Allen Stern’s got a couple, he runs with this and adds Kevin Rose to the mix, read more here.
Subscribe: