Scoble highlighted a great comment by the CTO of a microblogging service called Grazr. I’d encourage you to read the full comment, but can basically be summed up with this sentence:
The truth is, we like to talk about scaling, but without steady growth and something people find compelling, all the scaling in the world won’t help you.
Don’t ask me why, but after reading this comment, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to a typical high school prom. Not sure how things operated when you were (or still are) in school, but for me, the prom queen was much more likely to be physically attractive as opposed to being just regular-looking with an amazing personality. If the web held a prom, who do you think would be crowned the queen, Twitter or Grazr?
Don’t worry, Grazr. I’ll save a spot next to me at the next math club meeting.
4 responses so far ↓
Adam Loving // June 2, 2008 at 5:36 pm |
Well put.
astartupaday // June 2, 2008 at 8:18 pm |
Thanks man!
mikepk // June 4, 2008 at 2:28 pm |
Hey! We’re cool! …. Aren’t we?! Hello? …. Math is FUN!
This post really made me smile, thanks!
Minor quibble: Grazr isn’t a micro blogging service, in fact there’s no real analog to what we do. One of our ongoing challenges is working on something without an analog, even *we* don’t know what it’s supposed to be.
It’s especially hard when you get cornered into describing the product, you can’t say “It’s the YouTube for Vegetarians!” and have your audience nod sagely, instead you just kind of fumble with “well you can do this, and this, and do you know what a feed is?” … crickets…
We built a *ton* of technology hoping to find the mystical product-market fit, still haven’t gotten there yet though.
astartupaday // June 4, 2008 at 3:16 pm |
Thanks for the comment, Mike – I edited the post, apologies for the mislabeling.
It’s interesting, a while back I was actually looking for a service that would pull together multiple feeds into a single stream, and was shocked when I was unable to find one. I ended up hacking something together with Yahoo Pipes, but it was pretty unsatisfying. Cool to see you guys tackling that problem.
And no offense to any prom queens here, but let me ask a different question. If you were a VC and had several million dollars to invest in a technology company, which would you invest in: the one founded by the prom queen, or the one founded by the president of the math club?