A cursory review of the content shows a moderate number of submissions, extremely light "interest" (e.g. the number one "greatest" truemor has 5 "interested" points -- maybe I don't understand what that means?) and almost zero participation in the way of comments.
So some company overpaid him for what appears to be an extremely lackluster product? Is there more to it than this? Because if not, this falls in the same category of Ethan Hawke giving a presentation called "How I Got My Novel Published and You Can Too" -- i.e. useless.
It never had many customers. You could pretty much upload a picture of your next bowel movement, create a login system, if you had the PR machine that is Guy Kawasaki behind it, get at least 80% as many users as Truemors.
I've always like reading Guy's material. He often has very thoughtful pieces with plenty of actionable advice.
That being said I'm not impressed with either of his 2 most recent startups, truemors.com and alltop.com.
I'm not sure if its the idea or the implementation--but neither jump out at me as significant. I guess I expect more from Guy considering he's a world-known VC/author/blogger.
As much as I like Guy, I don't think Truemors or Alltop would have received as much attention as they have if they were built/marketed by anyone that didn't already have Guy's stature.
In other words, I wouldn't rely too heavily on these sites when considering "best practices" scenarios.
As much as you might not be keen on the guy, he proves that good implementation is more important than revolutionary ideas. Neither Truemors or Alltop are really ground breaking in what they're trying to do, but their implementations are pretty good.
Why so many haters? We're entrepreneurs. Let's study what Guy did well and learn from it. If he's willing to be open with his numbers, I want to learn as much as I can from it, don't you? And if the big lesson is that building a personal brand helps launch a site, let's do it.
I considered writing a counter-point to this on my blog, which is about actually starting a business on a shoestring. ($60 budget, ho!) However, I realized that I have users, revenues, and profits and thus my business bears about as much resemblance to Truemors as it does to fried jellyfish on a stick.
Has there been any indication of how much he sold it for.
Looking at the Alexa, Compete and Quantcast all seem to show that the Truemors never got much traffic and generates a tiny proportion of what Now Public traffic now. Why is it worth anything?
Even better, if he did get a decent price, can someone tell me how to get a buyer to value my site using the same metrics? I thought not.
http://truemors.nowpublic.com/
A cursory review of the content shows a moderate number of submissions, extremely light "interest" (e.g. the number one "greatest" truemor has 5 "interested" points -- maybe I don't understand what that means?) and almost zero participation in the way of comments.
So some company overpaid him for what appears to be an extremely lackluster product? Is there more to it than this? Because if not, this falls in the same category of Ethan Hawke giving a presentation called "How I Got My Novel Published and You Can Too" -- i.e. useless.