Interview with Guy Kawasaki (pt 3 of 3)
Truemors and Alltop seem like fun little side projects for you.
My status with Garage is kind of an Entrepreneur In Residence position. This is something I always wanted to try, these kinds of things. With Truemors, popurls sent us a lot of traffic, and I took notice of that. I’m a big RSS feed user, but if my wife or kids asked me which are the best sports feeds, I’m not going to tell them to get a Google Reader account, then subscribe to the feed, go the page, subscribe to the feed, etc, etc, it’s just too complicated still for the average person. So I would say just go to sports.alltop.com. So the target is not people who use Google Reader, or PageFlakes, it’s the other 99% of the population.
You’re definitely going after the mass market.
That is our hope. We have the top 40 topics now, and they are as diverse as “religion” and “cute.” Cute.alltop.com is feed sites like www.icanhascheezburger.com. Or things with cute dogs, cats, or babies. One of the things I learned in my career is that you just never know. If you think you’ve created this great site that everyone will visit, you’ll find you get beat by a site that features cute dogs.
How many topics can you put on the page before it’s too much?
That will be an issue. Pretty soon we’ll just be another Google. We currently have food.alltop.com, but we could also do wine.alltop.com or beer.alltop.com. And there are 200M people interested in each one. We think people will not necessarily bookmark our home page, but instead they’re going to bookmark sports.alltop.com. Right now we have all sports together, but we could do nfl, nhl, and nba.alltop.com. Then we could do just spurs.alltop.com for San Antonio fans. The topic organization is definitely an issue.
You have an editorial responsibility to decide what categories to cover and how to organize.
It’s definitely not about the wisdom of the crowds. We may do a poll about the popularity of the feeds within each topic, but some of the value is that we have decided that these 10-20 feeds per topic are above the fold. We’re not a search engine. We’re more like Mahalo, although there is only 1 person making the decision. I have to say the Twitter community has been tremendously helpful in identifying the top sites.
What about that first site the gets dropped off? What about that backlash?
I hope we drop a site and it creates a controversy, because that means it matters to be on Alltop.
When you finally have to hire someone to run it as a real business, is that victory or defeat for you?
The beauty of alltop is that if it succeeds, as long as the servers are on and the feeds are coming in, we’re good. We could sell advertising. We could sell sponsored feeds. We could make the first row $10K per month.
The bar across the front is certainly an interesting part of the design.
People either love it or they hate it. Electric Pulp came up with the idea, and we liked it. The tagline says, we’ve got (topic name) covered, so it’s kind of a pun. We might put a close box on it. The good thing about a small startup is that we don’t have to do usability tests around it, we don’t have to get someone’s permission to create it or change it. We think it’s cool, so we leave it. If you don’t like it, use Google Reader.
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