3by9

If You Don’t Own The Geeks, Own Someone Else

Pownce is a nice service. I have a Pownce account that I never use. I guess being a nice service doesn’t mean you will get any use out of it.

Pownce has a pretty website and killer client UI. Nobody really talks about Pownce like they do Twitter. That’s kind of weird since it looks way better than Twitter.

Pownce never goes down. Twitter goes down all the time. People talk about leaving Twitter, but yet they stay. That’s just crazy.

Pownce has the perfect team in place to utilize the power of personalities. Leah Culver is a geek and you really don’t get much cuter than that when you think about geeks. Kevin Rose is also on the team, you might have heard of him as well and the kind of pull he has. With those two alone there is no reason Pownce shouldn’t already be overtaking Twitter.

What the hell happened?

You could argue that they took too long to release an API. Yeah that might have hurt a little bit, but isn’t damaging enough.

Then I guess you could argue that keeping it in closed beta prevented it from spreading like wildfire. That hurts as well, but invite only betas have worked plenty of times before in the past so there really is no justification for why it would be the cause of failure this time.

Next argument I would go with is that Kevin Rose didn’t use all his power to really pimp the service. This is more damaging than the previous two arguments, but I still don’t think it is what hurts them.

Here is my argument, which I believe trumps all the rest:

If you don’t own the geeks, own someone else.

Twitter owns the geeks. Jaiku owned the European geeks and people who were pissed at Twitter. That leaves Pownce with the other 90% of the world to conquer. Tough right?

What’s that you say? You need the geek crowd first because they are the early adopters? They are the fools who try out any new technology and then pass it on to the normies of the world? Bullshit. Sure in some cases it’s true, but name me a couple of successful companies that made it big because the geeks took control and I bet you I can name you more that hit the big time from normies being the early adopters.

Now I will admit reaching the people you don’t really associate with can be really difficult. If Pownce wants to make a good run at it though I think they should go for it. Screw the feature pimping, nobody cares about file-sharing and in fact that probably hurts them because people wonder what’s the point in using a service that doesn’t replace email. I won’t drop them any hints on how they can achieve hitting the people that would take the service over the top, but if they sit down and do some thinking they will figure it out.

You know why US companies are seeing a greater potential in China than in the US? It’s not a difficult question. There are way more people in China. There are more non-geeks than TechCrunch people on the web. Why do we always go for the smaller group? Are we just more comfortable trying to reach them?

Does it surprise you that Digg hasn’t been bought although they have been actively trying to sell it for the (rumored) past year?

Now I am not telling you to go out and try to get the other 90% of the web’s population, that would be crazy. Seth Godin says “the more people you reach the more likely it is you are reaching the wrong people”, which I still have no idea what he is talking about considering he runs a company that needs quantity over quality (sorry I won’t link to it since I hate it). Hell, just forget I even quoted him this time.

It’s a basic business principle: find your niche. Unfortunately “everyone” doesn’t count as a niche. Pownce needs to find a group that would actually feel their app is useful. I’m not saying the geek crowd is already lost to them, but you can win easier battles elsewhere.

If push comes to shove just have Leah post some scandalous pics of herself (sex sells, admit it) or start a cool argument with Kevin Rose about the tryst they had last night to draw some attention.