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Get known / have connections / build a following

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Jun 16, 2023
8 min read

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Build a following

  • It is becoming clear to me from Martin's success and Pieter Levels' success and the success of Tom Francis that it is very advantageous to have a following of people who will be interested in your products when you release them. They will be your first customers, they will form the crucial early community, and they will tell their friends and help create some virality.

Articles / videos on how building a following helped someone succeed

People who benefited from developing a following

  • Twitch (Justin.tv)
    • In 2007, Justin Kan and partners Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt, started Justin.tv, a 24-7 live video feed of Kan’s life, broadcast via a webcam attached to his head. Kan’s “lifecasting” lasted about eight months. The novelty of Kan's concept attracted media attention, and resulting interviews with him included one by Ann Curry on the Today Show. Viewers accompanied Kan as he walked the streets of San Francisco, sometimes involved in both pre-planned events (trapeze lesson, dance lesson) and also spontaneous situations (being invited into the local Scientology center by a sidewalk recruiter). Afterward, the company decided to transition to providing a live video platform so anyone could publish a live video stream. Justin.tv, the platform, launched in 2007 and is now one of the largest live video platforms in the world with more than 30 million unique users every month.
  • Facebook
    • Zuck got known on campus for Facemash, and then a few months later he launched Facebook.
  • Product Hunt

Develop connections with people who are more likely be able to help you in the future

Articles

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ari_Ben-Menashe
    • Ben-Menashe was born in Tehran in 1951, emigrating to Israel as a teenager. His parents were Iraqi Jews who settled in Tehran in 1945. From 1974 to 1977 he served in the Israel Defense Forces, in Signals Intelligence. In 1977 Ben-Menashe joined Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate. He later said "I happened to be the right guy at the right time. I spoke Persian, Arabic, English. I knew the United States."In his book Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network Ben-Menashe said that following the 1979 Iranian Revolution his Iranian background provided useful connections, with some of his school friends playing roles in the new government. These connections, Ben-Menashe said, led to his playing an intermediary role in the Israeli effort to sell arms to Iran, and close to the Israeli government decision to back the Reagan campaign's "October Surprise" efforts to ensure Iranian hostages were released on a timetable that strengthened Ronald Reagan and not the incumbent President Carter.
    • This kind of ability to connect people is exactly why people go to prestigious schools (Harvard, etc.)

Try calling / emailing the person


Important: The types of projects that get you well-known may be very different from the types of projects that are viable companies.
- IMO Zuck is a great example of this, facemash would not have been a good idea for a company but it was a great way for him to get his name out there.

The battle of life is already half won by the young man who is brought personally in contact with high officials; and the great aim of every boy should be to do something beyond the sphere of his duties--something which attracts the attention of those over him.

Source: The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Kan

Richard Branson has repeatedly used publicity stunts to raise awareness of businesses he was starting.

Build up your social presence: have lots of people know who you are.

Make / do something cool / controversial


Ideas:
A website-game that has you try to create passwords while following certain restrictions. And maybe you have to try to remember your passwords too.

Examples:

  • Orson Welles became very famous from his "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, in which he (probably deliberately) had the show sound like a real news broadcast, which allegedly caused some panic. I think this stunt was what got him famous enough that a non-Hollywood person agreed to produce a film, which ended up being Citizen Kane, which cemented Orson's reputation for life.
  • Sean Parker got known via Napster, which probably helped him get accepted into Facebook and probably helped him help Facebook succeed
  • Mark Zuckerberg got known at Harvard by releasing cool stuff (like FaceMash and programs to help people collaborate in their classes), which probably helped him get Facebook used by lots of Harvard students
  • Ev Williams got known via Blogger, which helped him spread the word about Twitter
  • Lots of music artists have to release several albums to gradually build a following before they release the album that really blows up
  • Eminem got known to Detroit producers (the Bass brothers) by freestyling on the radio, and then got known to Dr. Dre by releasing two albums with the help of those Detroit producers. The first album was a failure but he learned from it and adjusted his style and the second album was a lot more successful.
  • Felix Dennis was in the press after he was arrested for publishing a lewd cartoon, it was a big national story in the UK. John Lennon ended up recording a song as a show of support.

Gather interesting data


Examples:
- Those two MIT undergrads who gathered data on the relationship between spam emails and the stock prices of the stocks those emails were spamming about.
- If my understanding is correct, Larry Page downloaded the entire Internet (or attempted to) in order to test out his Google idea. That was data that no one else had. 
- Joel Greenblatt gathered interesting data as a college student that eventually helped him get a paper published:

Nearly a year after Graham’s death, Forbes magazine published a more detailed explanation of his formula in an article titled “Ben Graham’s Last Will and Testament.” The article seized the attention of Joel Greenblatt, then a 19-year-old college junior from Long Island who had left high school a year early to attend !e Wharton School. “A light bulb went off,” Joel said of reading the Forbes article. “I can’t tell you exactly what it was about it that made me very excited, but it had elements of the things I was interested in: how to look at companies, how to think about the stock market, how to do something with a formula that could actually make money. For whatever reason, that’s when I really got turned on to the stock market.”

The article inspired Joel to test Graham’s formula for a more recent period, from April 1972 to April 1978, a period that included both a severe bear market and a sharp recovery. He enlisted the help of two classmates, Bruce Newberg and Richard Pzena, to conduct this new study. “Joel was an intense, focused guy back in college,” remembered Richard, who now heads Pzena Investment Management, a $15 billion investment firm in New York. “But then and now, he had one of the most upbeat, enthusiastic, and decent dispositions of anybody I've known. He just made you feel like working with him was an honor.”

The historical data the three students needed for their research was not yet available in computer databases, so they sat in Wharton’s Lippincott Library with a stack of Standard & Poor’s stock guides. Starting with the A’s, they resolved to go line by line through the guides until they had collected a random and unbiased sample of companies. After several months of work, 750 stocks seemed like enough — although the students did not get as far into the alphabet as they had hoped. “We took just the A’s and B’s, which was a decent chunk of the universe at the time,” Joel remembered. “Physically, the three of us just couldn't do any more.”

The trio then entered their handwritten data into a DEC10, one of the few computers on campus at the time. “It took up an entire room, and was secured and climate-controlled,” Richard said. “You sat at a terminal and punched data onto IBM punch cards, and fed them into the computer for analysis.” They used the computer to back-test four model portfolios they had come up with, each based on slight variations of the same factors Graham himself had used.2 Just as Graham had, the students made no effort to evaluate individual companies, industries, or management teams and used only data that would have been widely available had they been managing the portfolios in real time.

The results were outstanding. Each of the four model portfolios beat its relevant index by over 10 percent a year after trading costs and taxes, and with only slightly more volatility. The top portfolio returned 29.2 percent per year, but any one of them would have beaten nearly every professionally managed portfolio over the same period.

Joel, who thought about one day becoming an author, wrote up their results as formally as he could and submitted the paper to several academic publications. One rejected it outright, and he heard nothing from the others until he got a letter from Peter Bernstein, who was then editor of the Journal of Portfolio Management. Bernstein agreed to publish the paper on one condition. “He said he loved the study,” Joel remembered. “But he added, ‘Could you please have someone who can write send it back?’” Joel duly made the language a little less formal, and the revised paper was eventually published in the summer of 1981.

Source: Santangel's Review (it's a really good article)

Join a school / club / business where you will meet people

  • Larry/Sergey met the VCs that funded them through their Stanford professors, who knew VCs
  • Larry/Sergey found their first real office (a garage and bottom floor of a house) because Sergey had dated the house owner's roommate at Stanford Business School
  • 2013.10.25 - Dan Siroker at Startup School 2013
    • A good strategy that Google has for distribution is to put the word "Google" in front of the products they build, and by doing that you end up getting about 100,000 people trying your product right off the bat [NW: Just like Tom Francis with Gunpoint: he had people following his blog who helped spread the news of his game.]. That was very valuable, not only because if the product was any good, you'd grow much faster and be successful, but because of the feedback that those people would provide as you're incrementally improving the product [NW: Again, this is just what happened with Tom Francis and Gunpoint: the people following his blog gave him advice for what to improve.]. And this was the biggest lesson that I learned while I was at Google as a product manager, is the value of a feedback loop. This is the one critical thing I was missing at Sentiment Solutions, because I didn't have any customers to tell me what they liked or didn't like; I didn't even try to sell the product so I had no idea what I actually should be building.

If your product is for a wide audience, use publicity stunts to get widespread attention.

  • Richard Branson did this
  • Uber did this (ice cream delivery, kitten delivery, Delorean, helicopter rides, etc.) Not everything they tried would be practical but the point is to get people talking about the company.



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