Interesting thoughts about the TechCrunch Effect today.  Two things to say about it:

1. Its almost always unpredictable in its timing: my understanding is that Mike doesn’t email you the heads up as to when its happening, so you can’t necessarily prep your site for the giant influx of traffic from a load-handling point of view OR a marketing point of view (or, say, a “working” point of view).  So, when a site gets “crunched”, it better have all its ducks in a row well in advance because it sure as hell won’t get a warning

2. If your site is no good, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you have: in fact, getting a whole bunch of traffic, whether through Digg, or TechCrunch, or whatever, is like a test.  If you can’t convert all that traffic into regular users (or buyers — but, let’s face it, very few web2.0 startups actually sell anything other than advertising) then it doesn’t matter that you got covered because it needs to be Good to retain traffic anyway.

Put another way, you can “crunch” all the metrics you want (pun intended), but you should already be running your own internal tests, know your own numbers, and above all, create something that people will actually want to use.

The flip-side of that is that using the TC crowd / flashmob as your ‘testing’ group may not be all the representative of the traffic that you’re looking for (you have a social networking site for Mom’s?  TechCrunch filling up 1000 beta invites probably isn’t a representative demo), in which case you probably shouldn’t care about how the residual traffic plays out anyway.