Cameron Olthuis

There was a meme going around last week that suggests new web companies are only targeting an audience of 53, 651 people, which is actually the number of RSS subscribers TechCrunch had at the time.

A good review in Techcrunch can get a company their first 5-25K beta users very quickly.

I have to admit from what I’ve seen this tends to be true. A lot of these new 2.0 startups think all the need to do is launch, get TechCrunch to write about them, and they’ll spend the rest of their days sipping mai tai’s on the beach in Hawaii somewhere. Wrong!

Now don’t get me wrong. Viral marketing is great and I’m all for it. It’s a powerful tool. But unless you truely have what Seth Godin calls a Purple Cow it will eventually wear off. When that happens, your screwed, unless you’re marketing in other ways.

The so called purple cows can probably get away with doing nothing. Take FireFox for example, one of my favorite companies. They’ve spent hardly a cent on marketing yet they’ve got 150 million users. The product is so good that everyone who uses it tells 10 of their friends, and those 10 friends tell 10 more. Chances are your hot new idea isn’t that good.

The problem is most of these new startups aren’t doing other things to bring new users. They’re relying on the viral aspect of it. But people won’t continue to talk about you if you’re just like everyone else.

All you need to do is a take a look at some of their Alexa rankings to see what I’m talking about. The company launches, traffic takes off, it lasts for a couple months and then starts to drop. Take a look at Edgeio for example.

These companies need to be doing other things. Like search engine marketing for example. The amount of traffic you can bring in alone from SEO would make the TechCrunch buzz seem like peanuts. But the buzz is still great, and if you know what you’re doing it will really help leverage your SEO campaigns.

You should still try and get the buzz, just don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The traffic TechCrunch brings alone isn’t going to make you successful.