Which is really the point, isn’t it?

I mentioned it as much in my first post about Truemors, but there’s one vital thing missing from his equation.  After all, that he proved it costs virtually peanuts to *create* a web application is no great discovery.  That’s self evident to anyone who has a passing familiarity with the Web2.0 scene these days.

No, the real bit of the missing equation is how much publicity a somewhat mediocre product got.

Sure it cost just over $12,000 to make, but it cost zero dollars to get the publicity it got — leading to the massive influx of pageviews and uniques over that short period it was launched.  No, you can’t pay to get mentioned in a negative light on TechCrunch that many times, unless your name is Ted Murphy — and as an interesting aside, he mentioned at Mesh that he got multiples as many times as many visitors with negative posts on TechCrunch, and they all converted better than with positive posts — go figure!

Or, of course, unless you happen to be a luminary like Guy Kawasaki who happens to trot out a magnificent piece of meritrious rinky-dink twaddle.

The power of truemors isn’t in its wonderful software platform — its in its network effects.  And as a lesson to all would-be startups: if the special sauce isn’t in the technology, then its got to be in the network.  And if the network is all you’ve got, then you’ve got to grow it as fast as possible — and having a rock star founder is a big, big help because it provides you with all kinds of free publicity you wouldn’t ordinarily get.

The $12,107 figure is actually immaterial.  What’s important is how it was launched under Guy Kawasaki’s banner, and let’s face it folks — if it wasn’t Guy Kawasaki generating all that pub, Truemors would probably be languishing right with all the other bajillions of web2.0 startups who wouldn’t be half as lucky to get a single mention on TechCrunch, never mind three.