Re:Sell Yourself, Sell Your Work
by paulpauper on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @03:23PM
(#23250682)
Sorta agree with this but look at the success of Facebook. Zuck didn't have to sell Facebook. He put the idea out there and it was an instant success. if you find yourself having to sell too hard, maybe your idea is not that good.
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This is extremely false; lots of people had similar ideas at the same time. They all had to be sold to their audiences, and their investors. Zuckerberg had an advantage in starting from a very prestigious university.
He wasn't even the first person to come up with the idea at Harvard. Heck, there were two similar projects at Cambridge when I was graduating in 2000. And a dating site.
I guess the larger point is: he didn't spend much time telling people how great facebook was. He created something with utility and rolled it out in a way that would provide maximum utility to each additional person signing up. (Replicating existing networks in order of diminishing prestige)
Even if this were true, Facebook is an extreme (as in, 0.000001%) outlier. It's difficult to draw conclusions.
Re:Sell Yourself, Sell Your Work
by tobyjsullivan on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @03:49PM
(#23250973)
Is this really true? Like at all? Is it likely that he built Facebook v1 and registered thefacebook.com and sat back waiting for organic traffic?
I mean, my entire knowledge of the launch of Facebook comes from watching The Social Network so take it with a grain of salt. But wasn’t he a prolific LiveJournaler (writing about his projects amongst everything else)? I’d think that fits this article rather exactly.
Nah, the magic sauce (IMO) was the progressive roll-out. When only .edu addresses were allowed in, it was exclusive and regular joes were desperate to get in. Google successfully pulled the same stunt with gmail, but failed dismally with google plus.
Re:Sell Yourself, Sell Your Work
by fxtentacle on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @03:43PM
(#23250909)
Didn't he have marketing partners who later sued him?
Re:Sell Yourself, Sell Your Work
by antonzabirko on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @03:29PM
(#23250743)
This is the truth. The way our market defines success doesn't mean that thats what success is. Sure, you can abuse it and sell your product even if it's bad, but look where that has taken the world.
Zuck was talking to Harvard's newspaper about Facebook shortly after he started coding it, and as soon as it was finished he sent it to a 300-member email list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facebook
I have a side project where you rate statements 1-5 for their truthfulness. "Zuck didn't have to sell Facebook" makes me feel like I need to add even lower numbers.