(2010-10-25) Cohen Reputation Isnt As Powerful As You Imagine

Jason Cohen: Reputation isn't as powerful as you imagine. The most common reaction to my recent announcement1 of starting a new WordPress hosting company was that this blog provides me with a ridiculous unfair advantage.

“You’re starting with 18,000 prospects. How convenient. ;) I wish I had that kind of mailing list starting out.”

Fair point, but what actually happened after that post announcement? How unfair was this advantage?

Interestingly, Eric Sink got the same reception years ago when he launched a little company of his own. It’s worth hearing Eric defend himself because it’s just like my scenario, but because this happened six years ago I can reveal his results at the end of this post.

Let’s start with the results of my announcement:
WPEngine got two new signups. Only two. That with 18,000 wonderful, loyal, friendly, supportive RSS subscribers and as many page-hits from Twitter and HackerNews.

Not exactly the massive boost you nor I was expecting. I figured on 10-20 new customers at minimum and dreamed of 50. I was wrong by an order of magnitude.

Eric had a similar result: One month into his Winnable Solitaire experiment he had sold a total of six copies. Hooray for fame.

Let’s put this into broader context: At WPEngine we had 50 paying customers (not prospects) before my post went live. Most are paying $49/mo, a few pay north of $1000/mo (large blogs with serious traffic). So whatever we did without the advantage of this blog was far more important, at least for getting initial customers.

Still, the blog was instrumental in getting those first 50 customers, but not because I’m able to push WordPress hosting onto 18,000 unsuspecting victims, a.k.a. 1000 “true fans.” The blog did help with building the team.

I knew I needed a killer team for WPEngin - not just “capable,” but a group that would itself be an unfair advantage. See, “WordPress Hosting” is already a commodity

In a mature market you need severe points of differentiation or moats, and one of those (I felt) had to be the team itself.

We needed someone like Aaron Brazell. Aaron is a WordPress core contributor and the author of WordPress Bible (Wiley).

Well we got Aaron, and it’s because of this blog.

Eric’s experiment eventually failed. Well, “fail” is a too harsh a word, it’s just the one in-vogue nowadays, especially when describing an wonderful experience in which you had fun, learned a lot, grew as a person, and wouldn’t trade it for anything, particularly not a dull, predictable day job. You know, the kind of “fail” that characterizes a lot of software startups.

On sales of $216, Eric sold Winnable Solitaire for a small sum. Of course neither the exit nor the to-date revenue amounts to anything that anyone would declare a success.