Comment by friggeri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by friggeri | Hacker News Reader

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Related to this, I'm a PhD student from INRIA[1] and as part of my research on social communities I launched at the beginning of the year an experiment called Fellows[2] on Facebook doing more or less the same thing as Katango. Except that Fellows was not an iphone app but a web experiment which aim was validate a new quantification of social cohesion I have introduced (the results were presented in a peer reviewed conference, the final manuscript is on arxiv [3]).

I have been wondering about the difference of media treatment Katango and Fellows received. I tried everything imaginable at the time (pitching large blogs, sending emails, asking friends if they knew someone I could talk to, etc.) and wasn't able to get that much press, whereas when Katango launched they were much more covered.

I'm not complaining, we managed to have ~2500 participants which was enough to validate our model, but I'm still wondering why in one case the story got picked up and in the second case not. Is it because they're a startup and I'm a student ? Is it a question of USA vs. France ? Could it be because I lack the good connections to get introductions to media ?

Sorry for hijacking this thread, but I'd really appreciate insight on what they did right/I did wrong.

Thanks !

1: http://www.inria.fr/en/

2: http://fellows-exp.com/

3: http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.3231

Probably many reasons, but Katango was backed by Kleiner Perkins - one of the more prestigious and well-known VC firms out there, and it was the first investment out of their sFund which targeted social services and apps.

The blogosphere and others in the startup community will almost always be interested in what Kleiner, Sequoia, Accel, Greylock, Union Square Ventures and a few others etc are funding as they are well-known and regarded as thought leaders in the venture community. So by default, what they fund becomes more newsworthy almost implicitly. I'm not saying this is right or wrong - it just is.

I think this actually really bad, because it is a vicous circle.

You get founded by kpcb -> you get good press -> you get successful -> you get acquired by google -> this reflects positively on kpcb -> the press will write about the next startup founded by kpcb

At some point Kleiner won't have to anything.

But there are only so many startups that can be founded by the Kleiners and Sequoias of this world, erm.. valley. Is everybody else bound to fail?

Couldn't you say one is a known entity and one is an unknown. So Bill Nguyen vs. Make up a Name.

All things being equal, who do you favor, someone for whom you know some history or someone for whom you have no history?

Kpcb has historic cachet. If a venture succeeds, it's a story, if it fails it's also a story. If an unknown succeeds it's a small story‡ --if it fails it's an even smaller story (for a blog to write about).

‡Smaller b/c there's less confidence in an unknown, I think. Like an entrenched sports team with a winning history vs an upstart. Who has the fanbase (audience)?

Nice point! and I believe is something that the HN community agree in general. It can also be a subject for your research on social network. For example that you may need someone (person/company/site) with greater "social proof" (whatever it means) to leverage your current position.

From the promotion point of view I think the getting traction series contains good material: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/traction/

In my personal experience I achieved relative promotional success attacking the "magic middle", that is: neither the top, neither the bottom blogs/people/etc.

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