It's worth noting that Kevin himself didn't use these tricks to go from "one to one million", and already had many fans and lots of momentum by the time Digg was launched. He was already a celebrity of sorts and even used his later appearances on the Screensavers show to plug Digg.
Honestly, this makes no sense. It doesn't matter how famous you are - if your product sucks, people won't use it. Look at Ashton Kutcher's Blah Girls. It's a miserable failure - even though he's much, much, much more famous than a mere Kevin Rose - because no one really needed to see cartoon girls do a weak TMZ imitation.
I think people like to chalk up Digg's success to Kevin's "celebrity", where in reality, he's a nobody and Digg actually is a really, really good product for the niche it's serving.
Actually I think it's both. You can make a good product that nobody ever hears of, it happens all the time. You can also make a sucky product that a lot of people hear about and never come back to.
Digg was the right product for the right time, but Kevin's celebrity among its target audience was a large part of why it came out on top. It got a quick lead in terms of users and the network effect exacerbated that over time.
I think one not necessarily has to do with the other. In this example Kevin simply used his existing network for the launch of Digg. I agree with you that Digg is a great product for the niche it is serving. That's why it is successful. Pownce on the other hand wasn't a good product and had limited success despite Kevin's efforts to push it.
I actually thought Pownce was an interesting product I'm actually kind of surprised it never took off, except it was too "Twitter-like" so it never got the network it needed to gain critical mass.
Pownce's failure had very little to do with it being "Twitter-like". It failed because it didn't solve a problem that real people had.
Launching a product that is similar to popular incumbents isn't a negative feature. In many cases, it can help your unique selling point. Mint: Quicken but online and great UI. Hacker News: Digg for startups. Digg: Slashdot by the people.
It gives them a way to quickly communicate feelings, and to see what other people are saying quickly. Because it's so short, you can follow a lot of news without being overwhelmed.
Async communication is key to twitter. It's also cool that you can tweet by any method anyone has ever thought of, from almost any device that can send any sort of data whatsoever. The API has helped them greatly. I'm sure that someone, somewhere has a computer that transcribes short voice messages that can be left by phone. If not they will by the time I hit "reply" ... there should be a rule #34 for twitter.
* e-mail
* sms (key for reaching mobile people w/o smartphones)
* web browsers
* native apps / widgets
And then services like twitpic built around twitter.
The problem of people sharing the inanity of their day to as many people as possible. And the problem of people who want to read about the inane things that people do every day.
This is a very good and interesting point. While a mediocre product might not necessarily become a success just because it was launched by a person with a strong personal brand, it might however give that person the advantage of better and more initial visibility, which might result in more feedback. A good Entrepreneur (regardless of a strong personal brand), is then able to listen and adjust to the true market needs.
Well put. Gary V has 852,497 followers on Twitter - any time he launches a new product/book/cruise, whatever, that's an immediate 852,497 pairs of eyeballs on his product. Now that's a great head start.
Yes I did - thanks! I actually did the package for FOWA London 09 as well, which can be partially seen in the Kevin Rose vid. http://vimeo.com/album/132400
if it's this simple, why didn't Pownce take off? Hell they even had access to all of digg's power, and still had to shut down.
the reason digg took off was that he was more or less the first in that niche, and he had the power of his tv celebrity to drive that initial amount of early adopter traffic
I don't know if it really was about becoming first. I think Pownce just wasn't something that users really wanted. I think this backs up YC's idea of focussing on the product user's feedback.
I think no amount of marketing seen here can fix the problem of a product people don't want.
I guess it did. Remember Pownce was very popular back in 2007 and they added more features than Twitter had at that time.
The matter was people didn't wanna write thing twice, one in twitter and one in pownce, and since twitter had more users than Pownce (don't know how many more), it "won the race".
Kevin is a great Entrepreneur but it strikes me that we have heard this a million times before. There is some value for someone who is either very young and/or very inexperienced.
When listening to this talk I did have a moment of 'wtf' on the "Start a podcast" part. It's clearly a big part of Kevin's success - the whole rockstar celebrity diggnation thing.
But how good are podcasts now? Any startups finding them effective? Or am I just biased because I have no attention span to listen to them, so automatically discount them?
How about online video? Back when digg was young, podcasts were the thing; is video today's equivalent, or is it just 'being interesting on Twitter'?
