The weirdest things rejuvenate me

Yesterday I was having one of those typical tough-to-get-going kind of Monday's until I read this great case study on MySpace on Startup Review (a great new site from a fellow YE that analyzes web success). It turns out that the majority of MySpace's marketing didn't work well at first, and it took 6-9 months to become the viral monster that it is today.

MySpace took 3 months to build a site with similar features to Friendster, launching at the end of 2003. MySpace did not launch with the strategy that they would target independent music bands and create a social networking site anchored around music. This developed more naturally as a result of who they attracted to the site. Interestingly enough, MySpace did not begin to see user success until 6-9 months after initial launch and promotion. They started promoting MySpace by running a cash prize contest for Intermix employees (~250 of them); asking them to invite friends to use the site. This had some success, but was limited to reaching only a certain size. Next, they made use of the ResponseBase e-mail marketing list, which made some impact, but was largely considered a failure. This was because e-mail marketing does not attract people having loyalties to the site through a pre-existing group of friends or other association. MySpace then began promoting the site offline, sponsoring parties in Los Angeles with clubs, bands, and party promoters. This began to build the buzz around the site, but more importantly attracted micro offline communities (i.e. groups of people) to use the site together. Small community groups of 100 to 1000 people got more of the viral snowball effect going than attracting individual users to the site.

Why does this motivate me? Because one of the most overwhelming web2.0 success stories took that long to achieve success. Some may think that it happened overnight, and to a certain extent it did. But 6-9 months of "failure" is a long time when you're living it. iPrioritize is only 3 months old and it helps me to see that even the best had their struggles. I am satisfied with iPrioritize's start, but it needs to increase it's rate of growth over the coming months for me to continue to be satisfied. MySpace is just one of the many examples that make me believe that exponential growth is possible if you keep at it (note: iPrioritize is not the next MySpace, nor do I really want it to be...I'm talking on a much, much smaller scale here).

Weird how reading something like that lights such a fire under my ass...