Cuil launched this week amidst a blaze of publicity and promptly went down leaving us to read about the stellar backgrounds of its founders while they beavered away getting it working again. When it was back up I tried it and, well, it’s not very good. I ‘Cuiled’ facebook and all the first page results were from facebook itself whereas Google helpfully produced the wikipedia page amongst other more useful results.
That’s it folks, I’ll probably never go back now. Tried it once off the back of press hype, failed, won’t go back again. It taught me a few things. First more money does not equal better. Cuil raised $33m which allowed it a big PR spend and a big splash. I increasingly think that having a huge launch is like getting a sugar rush. You get a lot of attention in a very small space of time on the back of a big boast. The site falls over or doesn’t live up to the hype then users leave dissatisfied.
Users come first
As we come closer to launching our first product we don’t have any dilemma about having a big launch. We’re not having one because we cannot afford it. That said I’m not sure even if we did have big cash that would be the right path. Looking at the big successes, eBay, PayPal, Google itself, they all concentrated on building something useful then pushed it out onto the internet like a boat into the night. None of them readied a PR splash. The reason is that you don’t really know until it gets out into the wild how it will respond. There’s no point paying for the attention of a million people only for your site to collapse under the pressure. Far better to build up then hit the button when you are sure you can stand up to it.
The problem is that in startup land we are told that journalists/bloggers won’t be interested if your site has launched as they want the new thing. Therefore if you launch and run for six months you’ll never get coverage as you will be old news. I thought about this and I don’t buy it. The reason is that journalists are interested in what people are interested in. And people’s interest builds in tools they find interesting. Twitter never had a big launch but now gets a lot of press coverage because people are using it. Ultimately when launching you have to decide whether users come first or journalists. And when it’s put that way there should be no decision to make.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Wow, How Did Cuil Get So Much Publicity on Day 1?!
- Google afraid of Cuil? No. Google afraid of Cuil’s press releases? Hell yeah [Great Moments In Pr]
- Cuiling off
