Oct
29
A fellow Seattle entrepreneur and someone who is a great contributor to the startup community in Seattle, Andy Sack, is shutting down his company Judy’s Book. Andy is doing an incredible job handling the situation and every business founder and CEO should grab a keyboard and take notes.
One thing I found intriguing is how quickly the news spread on the day of his announcement last week. Within 20 minutes the news was wide-spread and within 6 hours it was in the mainstream press.
Launches work the same way. On the day of your launch your story usually gets picked up within an hour on mainstream blogs like Techcrunch. If you post to Digg or Reddit, you’ll know if you’re going to be on the front page within 10 minutes. When John Cook has interviewed me, he usually publishes the story on his blog within an hour. When the nytimes covered me it took 24 hours to get into print. Usually by the time print media gets hold of the story, it’s all ready been told and re-told and all relevant opinions have already been formed.
Dribbling out information like a Whitehouse press leak can get very ugly. Whatever your announcement, you’d better stay completely quiet until you launch, and when you do announce, provide all the information and, as Andy says, get out in front of it.
